Happy Gamer with some amazingly happy news

Hey everyone, Happy Gamer this time. Today was miserable with the heat and no A/C at my school. But the day was quickly salvaged with an amazing buy.

I was driving home from my elegy shot, and I saw a garage sale. Being a garage sailer, I stopped at it. They had the typical record, VHS, and other what not. Then I saw it in the back, an Atari 2600, with games and controllers. It was originally priced at $30 but I was able to get it at $20. What a deal right? Well somewhat.

When I got home, I saw that it connects via R/F input. If I got the name wrong or for those who don't know, that means old school rabbit ear connector. This would turn most people off or think "man I got screwed," but not me. I have adapters for antenna to cable and cable to antenna. Why, because I just do. Well I connect it to my TV, and it wasn't working. Damn!

Well being the resourceful person and gamer I am, I took the cover off to see if there was a connection problem. There was a slight one, so I pulled out an adapter for other consoles close to it's time that works similarly to the one that came with it. That worked a little but not quite. I then plugged the original one back in, and it worked. Yes!

But then there were further issues, the controllers wouldn't work. Things were starting to look grim, but once again, I was able to fix it with some work. Well after trying with original controllers, I take my Atari Flashback controllers out, and no success. I see where the controller board connects to the mother board, wiggle the ribbon wire around some, and it worked.

I now own an Atari 2600. This is so cool. It's like I just hit a video game collector and enthusiast milestone. $20 and an hour to fix it.

UPDATE: The origional conector box that came with it proved to be a piece of crap, so I did some web surfing and found a new way to conect it. I found that the transfer box could be disconected from the wire and replaced with an RCA phono to F jack converter. I got one of those at my local radio shack for $5 and conected it to the atari. Much clearer picture and sound then when compaired to the snowy and silent signal from the transfer box. I have to disconect the cable every time I wnat to play it, but it's worth it when I want to play it. Total investment, $25. Really beats a colectable price of hundreds or thousands.