Proud owner of a rare piece of Atari history...

TheDrewster

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I went to a semi-local warehouse today to pick up a couple backglasses for some of the pinball machines I bought several months ago. While poking around this warehouse, I found this gem. Truthfully not knowing the value and/or rarity of this piece, I made an offer on it because it looked like a ton of fun to play with and learn. We agreed on a price and home it went. I am now a overly-proud owner of a complete Atari Computer-Assisted Troubleshooter, or CAT Box.

Now, it's time to figure out how to use it. Test equipment like this has always piqued my curiosity, and this kind of stuff is right up my alley. Although today's technology has pretty much made this tester obsolete with all the equipment that is available to us, its still an awesome piece. If anyone can give me any tips or tricks, please join in the discussion!

 
These are handy for working on some Atari boards. They're essentially a signature analyzer (same sigs as HP 5004/5/6 series) and very basic in-circuit RAM/ROM tester. The testing is much fiddlier & less exhaustive than something like a Fluke 9010a can do, but can be helpful if you don't have anything fancier.

It's designed for 6502-based games only, but there are adapter pods for a handful of other CPUs. They're hard to come by.

You got a nice complete set with the manual, flyer, probe bag, SA harness, etc. The "it doesn't look like it goes with this" cabling is the sig analysis harness, you plug it into a header on the mathbox of boards which have them.

This is a modification you can do to add ROM checksums: http://arcarc.xmission.com/Test Equipment/Atari Catbox & Pods/Catbox_Mod.pdf

Lots more stuff on ArcArc for this.

Some PCBs have signature analysis guides which you can use with the Cat Box. Centipede, Tempest, Battlezone, Red Baron, off the top of my head.

It's a neat piece for sure. I have one, plus a PAT 9000. The CTS-1 also looks amazing, maybe one of those will drop into my lap some day.
 
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