My latest acquisition is an Atari 800 box that I won on ebay for about $100. It came with an Atari 1050 Disk Drive, joystick, trackball, number pad and about seven and a half million games on 5.25" floppies. I pulled it out of the box, plugged the RCA cable into the composite video jack (yellow of the familiar red-white-yellow threesome) of my TV and powered it up to see... nothing. Apparently when the Atari came out, RCA connectors had not yet been adopted for composite video so the signal run through the cable is a broadcast TV (VHF) signal such as you might receive from an antenna.
The quick fix that worked for me was this little "phono plug to 'F' jack" adapter that allows you to plug the broadcast TV signal into the jack that is expecting it: the cable/antenna jack in the back of the TV. I picked it up at RadioShack for something like $5 but you can probably find it on eBay for next to nothing.
After fitting the Atari cable into the adapter and then plugging the other side into the TV I was able to get the Atari up and running.
This link goes into a little more detail if you're curious.
One nice thing about the 800 and a few of the later models is that they have a monitor output in addition to the TV cable. The monitor jack is a 5 pin DIN connector which is apparently quite easy to convert to s-video so this might be a project for the future.
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