April 29th, 2020:

	The repair kit I ordered for my Atari 5200 controller arrived on 
Monday, and I had the time yesterday to install it.

The repair was quick, pop out the old buttons and mylar flex-board, pop in 
the new ones.  Unfortunately, only a few of the previously unresponsive 
buttons work... I suspect either the controller's cable or the 5200's 
controller ports are also damaged, perhaps both.

Slam has offered to show me, once the Covid-19 Pandemic is over, how to 
use a multimeter to check the connections etc, as I've never taken the 
time to learn.  Hopefully I can get a general electronics lesson out of 
him too, at this stage of my hobby I really *should* know how to do this 
stuff.

In other news, I've updated the 4P Diaries again [1].  I'm slowly working 
toward making my old TRS-80 a daily driver, along with my Coco 3, MSX2, 
Amiga 1200, and Amiga 4000 (all of which are underway and in various 
stages of completion).  Once they're all finished, I'll pretty much use 
them exclusively over more modern hardware.  There's a lot they *can't* do 
compared to modern systems, but not a lot I'd *need* to do.  For that, I 
have a cellphone, tablet, and Debian-based eeePC.


[1] gopher://sdf.org:70/0/users/sparcipx/4p/April_2020/04-29-20