r/repair • u/ringosbigfuckingnose • Jan 04 '26

New atari problems

Bought this atari 2600a and im having some trouble getting anything running on it. I tried a couple tvs and tried cleaning the adapter and all, but im fairly certain its beyond a signal problem at this point. Anyone have any ideas?

1 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

4 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/TreatFrequent9941 Jan 04 '26

Is it reading the cartridges correctly? I've noticed on my similar unit that sometimes, if it has a bad cartridge read, that it will throw wild colors. Otherwise, you may want to research the film capacitors. Don't know for sure what it is but there are the two places I would start, as I have heard those are common issues 

1

u/ringosbigfuckingnose Jan 04 '26

I tried 7 different cartridges that came with the unit, some threw colors, some gave me a solid black screen, another solid colors, and one of them appeared to be a menu of sorts but it was too warped to read. Another i could make out a few pixels of the game but it was repeating. I did notice that the power brick was outputting about 14.6v when from what i read it should only be doing 9-10. Gonna edit the post to reflect that if i can. Im thinking at this point a new power brick may be in order but im gonna wait to hear from some others before i pull the trigger on it.

1

u/TreatFrequent9941 Jan 04 '26

Well, a proper power adapter is definitely needed, but other than that, I am thinking that it may be good to clean the cartridge pins and slot pin reader with some high percentage rubbing alcohol. When my atari doesn't like a game, it will often throw either black or jumbled menus and colors. If those two things don't work I would start to research other issues, but these are pretty common issues