Recent content by Klankster

Hmm. Anybody know where I can get my hands on a used Asteroids or Asteroids Deluxe in the Milwaukee area? :) I have a Tempest and Space Duel (which would be great for a color multigame platform) but no B&W vectors suitable for this...

I'm just putting the final tweaks on it now -- just finished high score initial entry and saving to EAROM this morning. One cool thing is that all the original sounds work as is, since both Tempest and the Atari 8-bits used POKEYs for audio. Made my life MUCH easier! :)

Yeah, any news? I'm anxious to get my mitts on this so I can test out my vector adaptation of Kyle Peacock's "Bacterion" on actual hardware without having to burn a new set of ROMs for each test. Being able to simply download the code into the machine would ROCK. "Bacterion" was written for...

Please add me to the list! :):):)

Well, after writing this I started doing some more research and found out that a guy named Jeff Hendricks actually did just this back in 1999 - created a version of Space Wars that runs on Space Duel hardware! I have the ROM images and might try burning a set to try out on my spare Space Duel...

Today I moved the machine into the rec room and turned it on -- black screen, spot killer LED on solid. Hmm. The back was still off, so I jiggled the wiring harness that runs to the monitor and the spot killer LED went off and the display was perfect. Started playing with the wiring a bit to...

One game I'd love to get my hands on is one of the old "Space Wars" machines from Cinematronics. I loved it in the arcade back in the day. Just thinking about it a bit, the first thing that came to mind is, just how hard would one of these be to restore, if I could get one? It's a B&W vector...

I was curious about what that PTC thermistor actually does in the monitor, so I did some checking -- Turns out that it's part of the monitor's degaussing circuit! When the monitor powers up, the degaussing coil is activated, with current going through this device. As the degaussing goes on...

Well, not sure about yours, but mine was definitely a monitor problem! Here's what I found on mine: I pulled the deflection board from the monitor and flipped it over. The bottom of the poor thing had really gotten a hack job from somebody back in the 80's! Several repairs done with scraps...

OK, I should know later today what the story is. I got my hands on a known good Space Duel PCB and will swap that in to see if the display works.

Did a little more investigation on this -- I believe this is a monitor problem. If I rap the cabinet, the monitor image sometimes corrects momentarily. And there is a red LED toward the rear of the monitor's deflection board that is flickering -- I believe this is the "spot killer" LED? -- I...

And here is a video of the screen during attract mode. You can see that some output looks almost normal, like the high score table, but then it's distorted at the top (player1/player2 lettering). I'm still thinking serious DAC problem, converting the digital form of the display to analog...

OK, just tested with the main board connected, and it runs but the video problem I had before is still there. Some stills of the five test screens are below. Does this fault ring a bell with anyone? Screen1... Screen2... Screen3... Screen4... Screen5...

Just got the parts from Mouser today, so I swapped out the cap with a new Tantalum and changed out the known bad 3904 at Q12. Before testing I decided to check out the power supply and am glad I did -- Fuses 4 and 5 (4A, 250V slow-blow) were both blown. I guess I'm not surprised; With C107 bad...

I'm 52 and my first coin-op videogaming was done during a visit to Kansas City around 1976: they had a cocktail Pong machine at the Crown Center hotel, and a friend and I played the daylights out of that thing. When I went to college a few years later, the student union building had a...