RE: BattleZone probs....

        6) Even at double the price, in hobbyist quantities, it's well
worth the money (IMHO).
> (If you have to, skip lunch one day and your cost is covered)
>
Hmmmm... I think Mark needs to share where he does his shopping! From
Jameco a Dual-wipe 40 pin socket costs $.22 in singles. A Machine
tooled socket runs $1.15. That's more like 5x the price. Gets a
little painful when you're looking to replace 24 DRAM sockets on a
Defender. 24 machined sockets cost ~$11. You can get 100 dual-wipe and
pay for shipping for the same price...

I do admit though that if I'm suspicious of a socket, or know I'll be
plugging and unplugging stuff in and out I'll use the machined pin ones.

One big dis-advantage though-- you can't plug in any sort of
daughtercard (or anything with pins larger than IC legs) to the
machined-pin guys...

(We shipped hundreds of thousands of products with dual-wipe sockets in
products back in the AtariST/Amiga days. Very few-- if any-- actual
failures were attributed to sockets. As long as you're not
plugging/unplugging IC's all the time I think dual-wipes are plenty good
for repair and production work... Now cheap surface-mount PLCC sockets
are another thing... ;-)

> As far as dissimilar metals are concerned, A) gold doesn't tend to
> react. All of the
> gold pins/fingers I've come across look as good today as they did 20
> years ago.
> B) Most of the devices which built up "black crud" on the pins were
> the ones where
> there is some silver content in the metal, such as on mask roms. Look
> for the gold,
> gold is good.
>
I'll say from empirical evidence on Atari boards (in particular
Asteroids, BattleZone, Pole Position, and Dig Dug) that the customs and
mask parts seem much more likely to get the "black crud" when they're in
those gold-colored sockets. I agree that pure gold should be pretty
much non-reactive, but there seems to be a definate correlation in the
one's I've seen. Maybe the gold-colored sockets are some funky alloy or
something...

-Clay
Received on Thu Jan 21 11:30:42 1999