$50 garage sale find: Blasteroids

SuperGunGuru

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Now this was a great way to start my vacation week!!! :) Got a call from a cousin who spotted a game at a garage sale on her way home from work. It was an Atari Blasteroids that the seller didn't know much about and I was able to snag it for $50! While not a super popular game, this one is in pretty nice shape overall and I'd have to give it an 8/10 in terms of condition. It even has all matching serial numbers and, as far as I can tell, it has never been serviced. Right now it's got a few problems. The monitor is dead and a fuse in the bottom of the cab is blowing which I think is monitor related but I need to get a look at the manual to confirm. It's got a Sharp XM2001 in it. I can't get any sound either, but I did adjust the +5 after checking it and it was only at 3.5. Can't say for sure if it's playing blind so I think I'll concentrate on the monitor first. Overall not bad at all and hopefully this thing isn't too tough to get running.

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Looks nice. Hopefully the flyback is OK in the monitor as I think those are hard/impossible to find - at least that is what I recall. I found another working chassis and swapped it in. Still have the other chassis. I thought it had a bad FB - need to find it again. Anyway, Atari put these in a few of their games. I really wish they wouldn't have, though.

I always liked Blasteroids.
 
I have a sound board around here somewhere if you need one. Not sure if it works, but I think it came out of a working game...
 
I remember playing the game at Dirty Martin's Hamburgers near the UT campus when I was younger. Haven't seen one since. Nice machine, and a fantastic pickup!
 
I have a sound board around here somewhere if you need one. Not sure if it works, but I think it came out of a working game...

Does it use the same SB as Vindicators and Toobin'? Seems like the Vindicators and Toobin' sound boards looked the same, anyway.
 
Does it use the same SB as Vindicators? Just curious.

I dunno. It's a Quake III board or something. Actually I have two boards for Blasteroids - one is the Quake and I'm not sure about the other, but I know one (or both) is sound....
 
I remember playing the game at Dirty Martin's Hamburgers near the UT campus when I was younger. Haven't seen one since. Nice machine, and a fantastic pickup!

Dirty Martin's has a Pac-Man in there now...
 
Cool! It looks to be in great shape. I would love to get one of those someday. I think I recall seeing one of those back at a friend's birthday party probably 8 or 9 years ago.

Definitely a fun and underrated game. Plus, the spinner control is much better than the two buttons Asteroids originally used.
 
The cab and artwork seem to be in great shape! The CPO just needs a little love. Probably going to have to settle with trying to clean the exsisting overlay up, I doubt there's replacements avilable. Maybe get lucky on a NOS piece.
 
Great game, played it back in college and haven't even thought about it since. The key is getting good w/ switching between the 3 ships, and knowing which one you need for each task. Good luck bringing it back to life!
 
Thanks everyone for the kind words. This thing should actually clean up pretty well. The side art is in damn good shape with no major chunks missing. The coin doors could use some work but overall this thing is nice. This is my first venture into this hardware family from these late 80's Atari games so it should be interesting.

Thanks for the offer on that sound board, Mod. I may possibly have a failure on that oddly enough. The fuse for the 12vdc lo blows immediately on power up. A quick glance at the manual shows that feeds the sound board so that and the monitor appear to be my 2 challenges. The small fuse f701 which is also for the main power input is blown on the monitor so I'm suspecting bad flyback or hot. I belive Chad @ Arcadecup has the flyback if that turns out to be it.
 
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Oh Bill...you don't want that game taking up valuable space in your game room...do you?

Good score though, keep it up.

Vacation huh?

-Tim
Actually the main reason I bought it was as a possible flip/part out but being it's in such good shape and even all matching serial numbers, I don't have the heart to part it out. I will probably just fix it and sell it unless the game is so much fun that I want to keep it hehe. From what I've seen it looks like I have about a 100 budget to fix this thing and still at least get my money back if not make a small profit.
 
Actually the main reason I bought it was as a possible flip/part out but being it's in such good shape and even all matching serial numbers, I don't have the heart to part it out. I will probably just fix it and sell it unless the game is so much fun that I want to keep it hehe. From what I've seen it looks like I have about a 100 budget to fix this thing and still at least get my money back if not make a small profit.

Anything I got worth a trade? Not that Blasteroids is really a game that I wanted but if it would help you out I'm all for it.

-Tim
 
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