Power supply ‘fixing’

When I got the 800xl, it came with an original Atari power supply. Problem was, the voltage output was, erm, nothing!

The supply should output 5v at 2a, which just so happens to be what virtually every usb phone charger you might have lying around in a drawer outputs, so the first thing I did was to remove the cable from the broken Atari supply and solder it to a cut down usb cable. This allowed me to power the computer up at least, but didn’t really satisfy my need for everything to look as original as possible.

It works, but isn’t pretty!

So the plan I came up with was to take the old power supply electronics out of the Atari ‘brick’, put the usb charger inside and close it all up again. The end result would be lighter in weight than the original, but would at least look the part.

I want it to still look like this!

I managed to lever the base off of the supply brick, though it did break some internal fixings, but no big deal. The supply itself was actually ‘potted’ which means it was buried in a kind of rubberised epoxy resin that had been poured in around the supply electronics. By soaking the power brick repeatedly in boiling water, the resin started to break away and I was eventually able to remove the contents, leaving an empty plastic PSU brick, and the cables.

Hollowed out Atari ‘brick’

From here, I attached a mains power plug socket to the plug cable, plugged my modified usb charger and cable into this and then hid all of that inside the hollowed out brick.

I’ve described it badly – here’s some pictures!

Original PSU cables attached to an old Samsung USB charger power supply

USB charger power supply and original cables fitted in original PSU brick

Base refitted

And the finished article – a working supply that looks original

So now I have a working PSU that uses the original Atari brick and cables to keep the original look, but has a modern 5v usb supply inside.