Here's my experience with "The Socket"...
"The Socket" appears in the 6-switch 2600 on the main motherboard just
above the TIA chip. There are plenty of empty component holes in the
6-switch 2600 which suggests they planned to add a lot more to the machine
but cut back to save costs. Some of these empty component holes are
probably for a 1/4 watt amp to drive internal speakers instead of sending
the sound to the TV, this was a feature that was scrapped. Another fuction
of these scrapped components probably had to do with "The Socket".
If you put a 2K game ROM into "The Socket" it will play that game when
the machine is booted. However, the machine has no means of telling if
you have a cart plugged in so plugging a cart into this machine will
have unpredictable results (sometimes it'll switch to the cart, sometimes
you get the internal ROM, and sometimes everything goes kaplooey).
I've put a Combat rom into my 2600 and experienced this very thing.
CRACKERS
(Playing with "The Socket" from hell!!)
----- Original Message -----
From: "Adam Thornton" <adam@xxxxxxx>
To: <stella@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2004 10:29 PM
Subject: [stella] Rev B: what's that extra socket for?
I took my 2600 apart tonight; it's a six-switcher with a Rev B
motherboard, (C) 1977.
Between the 6507 and the TIA, there's a 24-pin pad. It's clearly
designed to hold a socket, but there's no socket in it and the vias are
filled with solder.
I'm guessing that there was another part Atari was considering but
dropped for cost reasons. Does anyone know what it was? It looks like
a bunch of the lines run to pins 5-11 on the '07; that makes me suspect
that it was likely to be either ROM--a built-in game?--or onboard RAM.
Does anyone know?
Adam
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