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I recently sent my Asteroids PCB and monitor components to AndrewB, along with a Tempest PCB, AR, and everything from the 6100. It was a little pricey, but I didn't mind spending the extra coin knowing that once everything was shipped back to me I should have no problem dropping the stuff in the cabs, fire em up, and then instant party because there should be no issues after someone like Andy looked at it.

Well, it didn't work out that way at all. I'm not sure anything worked properly when I received it except for the Asteroids stuff- to his credit the Asteroids fired right up and was pounded on for 3 days straight in Atlanta at the Southern Fried Gaming Expo. Much to my disappointment, the Tempest didn't make the trip to SFGE. The sound didn't work on the Tempest. No matter what I did the spot killer wouldn't go out on the monitor. The board wouldn't even boot. It seems the only "party" I was having after getting all this stuff back was a repair party. I've been through that damn startup guide 50 times and decided on two different occasions that I just don't need any vectors.

Andy explained how to test all of the wiring for the sound and we discovered that the sound was a problem in my cab (defective speaker) and got that resolved. He walked me through testing big blue and all the voltages from the AR and a bad connection at the fuse block kept the board from booting. The spot killer was an issue with one of the harnesses for the transistors, which he took care of for me. With each issue, Andy did what he could do to be encouraging and kept saying "we will get this." He has done this enough to know that its easy to get frustrated as someone who has spent good money on repairs finds out his stuff still don't work. NONE of the issues I had were actually related to the repairs he made or even the parts he touched, but he hung in there with me and through PAGES of back and forth PM's, he worked through all of my issues and now I have a perfectly working Tempest.

I am 46 years old and have never played Tempest. I've owned 3 of them. Tempest is truly an awesome game, and I keep coming back, again and again, for "one last game." It is one of those games that your hands and eyes go into auto mode and you play from reflex and through your peripheral vision. It seems I always do something stupid to die, like steering into one of those spikes to impale myself at the end of a level (even though I may have been reminded to "AVOID SPIKES") which angers me and I end up killing all of my other men in the same fashion out of frustration.

What is really frustrating is that I haven't been able to knock off the AAB initials at the top of the screen along with his high score of 544,693. I assume that he just plays a few rounds to test the high score saving function and that this is only a "decent" score for him. I can't even make it to 300,000. It definitely has challenged me, and is probably a good part of why I keep coming back. Every time I go in the gameroom, I power up nothing else but the circuit that powers up Tempest, telling myself I'm gonna beat Andy's AAB today, but I never do and I got a way to go.

Andy is top notch, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. Incredibly smart guy but able to dumb it down and explain it to the layperson. He probably spent far more time responding to my messages and working with my other problems that he actually spent working on the boards. THANKS FOR ALL YOUR HELP @andrewb, WORTH EVERY PENNY AND THEN SOME!!!!
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