Asteroids PCB lives

ieure

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Donor 2014-2015
Joined
Feb 12, 2010
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Just marking the first PCB repair I've performed. My board died in the middle of a game, so of course, rather than getting it fixed, I bought two more untested boards to screw around with. One booted up with scrambled vectors and kept resetting, then the crystal broke off while I was handling it. Replace the crystal, run self-test, says bad RAM 4. Socket and replace the chip, boot into self-test, everything passes, boot the game and nothing seems to work… Can't start a game, none of the buttons respond… Back to test mode, everything works fine.

Then I realized the board wasn't set to free play, tripped the coin switch, and it worked perfectly.

An easy repair for sure, but I'm, a) awfully happy to have a working Asteroid again, b) happy to have a working board to compare to as I go over the other two, c) Pretty damn pleased with having fixed it myself.
 
Great feeling, congrats. It's so nice when self-test does its job.
I also like the part about having to put in a quarter to start a game.
 
Just marking the first PCB repair I've performed. My board died in the middle of a game, so of course, rather than getting it fixed, I bought two more untested boards to screw around with. One booted up with scrambled vectors and kept resetting, then the crystal broke off while I was handling it. Replace the crystal, run self-test, says bad RAM 4. Socket and replace the chip, boot into self-test, everything passes, boot the game and nothing seems to work… Can't start a game, none of the buttons respond… Back to test mode, everything works fine.

Then I realized the board wasn't set to free play, tripped the coin switch, and it worked perfectly.

An easy repair for sure, but I'm, a) awfully happy to have a working Asteroid again, b) happy to have a working board to compare to as I go over the other two, c) Pretty damn pleased with having fixed it myself.

I've got both an Asteroids upright and cocktail--currently restoring the cocktail--and I must say that it's been quite handy having another machine to swap parts with while trying to debug issues...Makes narrowing down the source of a problem nearly lightning fast.
 
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