Re: [stella] Rev B: what's that extra socket for?

[Glenn Saunders <mos6507@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

In the earlier 2600 design days they thought about not having a cart port 
and forcing people to send their 2600's somewhere to have the chip swapped out.

They were worried about static discharge blowing up the motherboard and 
other liabilities involved in the cart insertion process.  That explains 
why the carts and the port have that elaborate dust cover mechanism.

I'm guessing that the motherboard design was finalized with a socket and 
then they added the cart port later and left the socket in there.  I 
vaguely recall somebody saying the socket was used for diagnostics on the 
assembly line.  Since the first rev of the 2600 featured two boards 
connected by a ribbon cable it might have made sense to run diagnostics on 
the main motherboard using the socket.

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