Atari 2600 Music Making

Atari 2600 - Wicked Games, Wicked Beats

Remember this one? Plug it into a TV and your rumpus room is the video arcade, without the dodgy teenagers trying to sell you bags of oregano.

If your memory is good enough you will remember it sounded damn cool. When you have finished Packin' the Man and getting Spaced with the Invaders stick this cartridge in your slot:

SYNTHCART!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
A Mister Paul Slocum has recently programmed a synthesiser cartridge, it is mainly a beatbox - and boy are these beats block rocking! Huge squarewave kick drum madness. Order the cartridge from Atari Age (great site to deal with), get a 2600 from an op shop (I have a big old one for the 'studio' (okay its my bedroom) and the little junior model for touring).
Then it gets a little tricky.
Insert an audio out into the Atari, anybody who has ever wielded a soldering iron can do it. Then locate two keypad controllers, which the software needs - these are also known as Kids controllers and came with several games, they are keypads like what you have use to get into a ICBM silo.
I spent six months trying to locate the keypad controllers - if they show up on Ebay bidding gets pretty messy. So here is what I did:
Bought from the local electronics shop:

2 X 9-pin female D-sub connectors
1metre of 8 core cable
2 X 12 digit keypads (like on a phone - ask for the data sheet, you'll need it)
2 X 4.7k resistors

I flogged the following table from Jay Tilton's Atari contoller pinout site.

9-pin female D-sub connector on the keypad.

Top row (1, 2, 3)
Second row (4, 5, 6)
Third row (7, 8, 9)
Bottom row (*, 0, #)
Left column (1, 4, 7, *)
Right column (3, 6, 9, #)
+5V--pulls up pins 5 and 9 through 4.7k resistors
-
Middle column (2, 5, 8, 0)

Now join the dots. With your soldering iron. With a steady hand. Which I don' t have. Ouch. Should see a doctor about that.
Use the above table as a guide, below is the connections I made for the particular keypads I bought..

Keypad Solder Tabs	D Connector Pins
1	9 +resistor attached to connector pin7
2	1
3	5 +resistor attached to connector pin7
4	4
5	6
6	3
7	2
	7 - the 2 resistors soldered here
	8 - not used

Pictures of what I did later on! This job only took a few hours and is simpler than it sounds.

Oh and stick the thing into a video projector at the rave you are playing at - load up PacMan and the kids will go nuts! You'll be a cooler cat than a siberian tiger.

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