A while back I purchased a non-working Atari Lynx 2, and that blog will come later. In the meantime, I’ve just acquired a non-working Atari Lynx 1 – yes I like buying broken things and fixing them!
This particular Lynx winged its way to me all the way from Egypt! I love Egypt I have a special affinity to it and so I just had to have this.
The Atari Sphinx
Well that’s what I’m calling it from now on!
So, as expected, this didn’t power up at all. I tried batteries, and I tried adding a power connector to the battery terminals on the motherboard. Nothing. The original dc jack socket is missing it’s pin, hence I couldn’t plug anything into there.
Looking at the board, I couldn’t see anything obvious. Capacitors look okay, nothing burnt anyway, nothing missing anywhere. Breaking out the multimeter I could see that power was definitely getting to the board.
Mosfet
I couldn’t think of a better heading there. Anyway, it just so happened I had a spare mosfet, so I decided to whip the old one out and put the new one in. I thought this was going to be a real pig to do, but with a soldering iron and a solder sucker, and a pair of pliers, I managed to remove the old component quite easily.
Moment of truth
So, that was actually relatively easy to do. I normally mess these things up big time, so no-one was more surprised than me that I didn’t break anything.
Now to turn it on. I plugged in the power, and hit the on button…
And, ta-dah!
Amazing. A quick and simple repair and I have a working Atari Sphinx – ahem, Lynx.
Still to do…
So, I’m absolutely chuffed with this one, but there’s still work to be done. A number of the carbon contacts on the buttons are worn out, so they need replacing. I also need to replace all the capacitors. A little bit of extra play today and it’s developed a green horizontal line across the screen. Hopefully that will disappear after the re-cap.
