The other day I found a ridiculously cheap Atari 2600 Junior on Vinted. It was listed as "untested", which typically means completely broken.

I was ready to give it a try though, since it also came with a Joystick and a game, so not much would be lost.

To my big surprise, it turned on and delivered a picture - I had not expected that!

When I tried to play the game however, I quickly found out about the "untested" nature of this unit - joystick input would not work.

Closer inspection of the joystick port immediately revealed the problem - 2 of the pins were simply missing!

Fixing the Joystick Port

This should be an easy repair. I opened the case, unsoldered the broken port and added a new one that I had among my spare parts.

With the replaced port, everything should work smoothly now ... only, it didn't 🤬!

Testing the joystick on another one of my Atari 2600s, I found out that the joystick itself also had an issue. It worked only in 2 directions and the fire button was not working either.

OK, so this joystick was "untested" as well. Time to fix it.

Fixing the Joystick

So I opened up the joystick and with my multimeter tested for continuity between the switches on the board and the pins on the connector. As expected, some of the pins did not have continuity.

Luckily, I also had a spare joystick cable ready, so I got rid of the old one and soldered in the replacement.

With the cable replaced, everything was working as expected now.

So, a little bit of time invested, some spare parts and I have a fully working Atari 2600 which I got for a bargain 🤩.