Can't remember if I mentioned this here before, but the Atari 1050 disk drive that I thought was dead — and which I was rather sad about, since it was the Atari 1050 I grew up with — is no longer dead. I did a bit of reading online and asked the AtariAge forums and the recurring advice was "clean the head", so I… got Andie to clean the head. (I trust her more with delicate electronics than me!)
I'm pleased to report that I once again have a fully functional Atari 8-bit system with 1050 disk drive. I am just missing a SpartaDOS X cartridge, so unfortunately I can't access any of the stuff on the four volumes of "Pete's Disk" right now — which is a shame, as they had a bunch of magazine type-ins on them, along with some of my own programming experiments — but aside from that, most of the 30+ year old disks I have seem to be working just fine!
Sadly, attempts to rescue some of the old, knackered joysticks didn't go so well; my Spectravideo and Konix joysticks all appear to have at least one worn-out microswitch so they don't move in certain directions, and what I believe is actually an Atari 7800 joystick doesn't move at all. (The fire buttons work, though.) Thankfully, I still have the Monster arcade-style joystick I got a while back, so that fulfils all my needs for now… plus I'm pretty sure I have a Zipstik and a Wico Commander(?) somewhere that both work if I happen to ever see another human being ever again.
Emulation is great — particularly for practical purposes like video capture and screenshots — but nothing beats the real thing when you just want to sit down and play something, so I'm very happy everything's back in full working order!
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