Re: Atari Cat boxes

David Shoemaker wrote:

> As I have spent the past two days trying to figure out my Battle Zone
> board problems I was wondering if a Cat Box might help. If nothing
> else it would have made testing the ls244's easier.
> Open to ideas and comment.
>

Gosh I've gone round & round with the BZ mathbox & Atari Cat Box, very fustrating thing
to fix.

I also used my Cat Box this past week to verify some EPROM checksums on a PCB.

Is everyone else finding the 74LS244's a major source of problems? I' worked on 3
Missle Command PCB this week and found many of them to be bad. Rom cheksums won't work
at 5.0 VDC but do work at 3.8 and other assorted oddities.

I like the Cat Box but I think we have much more talent & abilities here to build useful
test equipment.

How many people own and actually use a Signature Analyzer here? It is a very rare
occassion that I'll drag mine out, a O-scope will catch most thing and is simpler to
use (already set up and running on my bench, directly under my computer monitor).

Logic probe is a useless function on the Cat Box.

RAM/ ROM tester & EPROM checksums are the neat functions I like.

This weekend I rigged up a cable interface, that plugs to the Atari Test Connector and
mates with a 40 pin wire wrap machine socket that I insert into my EPROM reader (wired
up as a 512 EPROM). With this I remove the 6502, and read the ROMs, in curcuit.

I assume it would be possible to program a R/W for RAM testing too. On the Cat Box you
must do this by hand, loading the RAM then reading/comparing the RAM. Wouldn't it be
possible to do all this with a EPROM burner?

The idea of the ICE was also mentioned before here but I belive that is too expensive
yet, commercially.

Look at other games that also have the "test connectors" built in....

Galaxians/Pac Man (Z80 <- Atari also had a module to do Z80 & 6809, I have the Z80,
never seen the 6809).

Bally MCR series.

But wouldn't a 40 pin CPU socket work best?

-- 
Kev           http://www.erols.com/mowerman  <- Coin Op Video Game site
REMOVE "?" FROM MY E-MAIL
                           Looking for any Pac Man info & a few good PCBs...