Asteroids Restoration

Another fine A/R Rebuild

Once again, I sent out the A/R board to MrBill08 for a rebuild. Great work as always!
 

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Interior clean

With all the woodworking completed and the vinyl artwork on, it's time to scrub and clean the inside before moving it into the house. For my process, this signifies that I'm halfway done the restoration, yay!

Enjoy the before and after photos. It wasn't too bad in there overall. Mouse, the cat seen in the after photos, inspected and approved. Also, my wife and I are getting good at moving these things up the stairs.
 

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Hello, Big Brother

Formerly called the music room (where I had a DAW workstation and pretended to continue doing music in), it's now becoming the Game Room. I can probably fit about 7 games in here. We'll be moving in a few years to a house with a real basement and not the 4' midget basement currently in this house. Until then, you work with what you have.

Asteroids Deluxe, meet your older brother, Asteroids. He's feeling a little empty right now, but we'll cheer him up soon enough!
 

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T-Molding

QuarterArcade was quick in shipping out the second strip of t-molding I forgot to order, so with some help from a furry friend I got that installed last night.
 

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Feet don't fail me now

Here's a photo of the underside work I had to do. The original casters were rusted together with those crappy in-wood mounts, so they had to be completely removed. Patched up the holes, and mounted these floor-friendly Teflon Levelers from Quartercade mounted in Arcade Adventure's mounting plates.

Should be obvious why they are installed on an angle like that, I didn't want to drill and have the bolts I used going through the plastic wood.
 

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4th edition hacks

Also from QuarterArcade I picked up a 4th edition of the Asteroids manual that came with a hand-written instruction on speeding up the game by cutting pins 3+ or 4 on C5. Ok, so which one is it, guy :)

Here's the official info on this speed hack (found here):

Code:
This mod will increase the overall speed of your asteroids game.

You will need some 30 gauge wire and a switch.

1. Clip and lift pin 4 of C5 (74LS161)
2. Wire switch as follows:
   * Common to lifted pin 4
   * Normally closed to pad where pin 4 used to be connected
   * normally open to pull up resistor next to C5

NOTE:
1.  Be sure you wire the end of the pull-up resistor *not* tied to +5V.
2.  Clipping any other pins besides pin 4 may have adverse effects on
    Audio, Video, and/or coin discrimination.
--
 

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Also from QuarterArcade I picked up a 4th edition of the Asteroids manual that came with a hand-written instruction on speeding up the game by cutting pins 3+ or 4 on C5. Ok, so which one is it, guy :)



You can do either or. The speed change will differ depending on which pins you lift/cut.

If you lift both pins, the speed increase will be more than if you lift just one.
 
Power Brick Porn

Cleaned up power brick. Gave it a naval jelly bath, then hit it with a wire brush on the angle grinder, followed by several passes of sand paper grits on the variable sander. Polished it with Brasso.

Some initial trouble shooting events took place during my first flight-check before powering the game up:

  • Pull all fuses to check for proper voltage/amps in each slot. After checking the main fuse, I went full retard and used a pair of needle-nose to pull out the first fuse in the bank. Inspected. Placed fuse back in needle nose, went to push fuse into fuse holder and glass exploded all over the place. Derp. Placed order for new fuses all around.
  • Went to connect the power switch up to the connectors and the fucking power switch casing crumbles apart as I'm trying to push the connectors on the pins. Order placed for new one, meanwhile I took the power switch out of Asteroids Deluxe to continue.
  • Nothing happened on first power-up of the block. A pin on the 6-pin molex connector for the power on/off plug got pushed out when I connected it up. You can even see it on the photo of the underneath, it's the blue wire that should be on the bottom middle hole. I didn't notice it originally because the blue wire buried itself. Double checked all molex and pins after that.
  • Finally powered up, all voltages check out great. But there's a loud hum from the transformer, and it vibrates through the cabinet making it louder. This transformer doesn't have the brackets that Bob Robert's transformer noise article has. For shits and giggles I unbolted the transformer and re-seated it and that seems to have reduced the vibration considerably.

Now that the brick is working fine, hooked up the A/R I and checked voltages on there and it too was rock solid. So, time to connect the PCB and the chassis!

And we got quick blinking player 1 & 2 buttons, no video. Neck glow, no spot killer. I knew the PCB worked when I got it back from being repaired as I tested it in Asteroids Deluxe. So what the hell. After double checking voltages and looking over more molex pins, cleaning the edge adapter again for the PCB, I decided to throw the board back into Asteroids Deluxe to see if it was working. Nope. More pulsing player 1/2 buttons.

Apparently, the Asteroids board got bored sitting on a shelf for a month and wanted attention. I pulled all the IC's, hitting the sockets & pins with DeOxit, and not really doing much sanding on the pins since that work was already done. This brought the board back to life and booted up fine in the Deluxe cabinet.

So back to the Asteroids cabinet with the Asteroids board and now the game boots up just fine, however it is playing blind. So what I now have is probably the more annoying scenario to diagnose: Game plays blind, neck glow, spot killer is off, no display chatter from the tube or static buildup on the front. Alright, I narrowed down the next set of things to check:
  • Ordered a new PCB edge connector from the arcade shop as well as a double-head pin removal tool from FrozenCPU
  • Pull the board from the chassis to possibly reflow the edge connectors
  • Shake fist in air and swear a lot
 

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Twist Ties

A little trick I use to keep cables in order even with lots of photos taken on everything is the use of colored twist-ties. It's especially useful here on the fuse connectors because you have two sets of same-colored wires. yeah it's probably a little obvious where each one goes due to its length, but it doesn't hurt (at least for me) to be a little more cautious anyway.
 

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So what I now have is probably the more annoying scenario to diagnose: Game plays blind, neck glow, spot killer is off, no display chatter from the tube or static buildup on the front.

Reflow the headers on the deflection and HV boards of the monitor.
 
Reflow the headers on the deflection and HV boards of the monitor.

Yep, that's what I meant by chasis board with regards to the deflection board. I'm hoping to avoid messing with the HV board but we'll see.

The new edge connectors arrived today, ArcadeShop is quick! Just waiting for the pin removal tool to arrive to tackle that.
 
Amazing! Jeez, so clean. Putting my Asteroids Deluxe to SHAME!!!!!

Heh, it helps that my asteroids deluxe was clean to begin with and a house game for most of its life! Given the exterior and interior condition of this Asteroids, it cleaned up nicely, didn't have a lot of damage at all, just stupidity screwed and bolted onto it all over.
 
Fuck You

Finally got the video to work!

After 2 weeks of troubleshooting, reading over schematics (I have at least a revision 5 game according to the schematic packs), determining which revision deflection board I had, and countless hours of voltage testing... the culprit turned out to be the coin door I connected from Asteroids Deluxe.

With the door connected to put the game in test mode, the voltage for the heater off the block at pins 8 & 9 read a health 7 volts. Up at the molex connector at pins 9 & 12 had .2 volts. It took a good while to narrow it down to this. I was going off the wrong version of my board and reading the wrong pins.

So what's sucking up the power? Oh, there's also a couple blue wires off pins 8 & 9 running to the coin door. Alright, let's disconnect that... again. Because this isn't the first time I tested the game without a coin door. Or another door, I have 3 now. I'm assuming from all the testing and minor fixes I did along this long process of troubleshooting, I fixed something that made a difference.

Oh well, I won't complain, it's working pretty damn nice. No controls in place outside of player 1 & 2 buttons, I need to clean the leafs and fix a broken connection there. But hell, this is what I needed to have accomplished to start on the wrap up process to have this game completed.

Today was a good day.

13741252_1643333039244571_1370173819_n.jpg
 
Finally got the video to work!

After 2 weeks of troubleshooting, reading over schematics (I have at least a revision 5 game according to the schematic packs), determining which revision deflection board I had, and countless hours of voltage testing... the culprit turned out to be the coin door I connected from Asteroids Deluxe.

With the door connected to put the game in test mode, the voltage for the heater off the block at pins 8 & 9 read a health 7 volts. Up at the molex connector at pins 9 & 12 had .2 volts. It took a good while to narrow it down to this. I was going off the wrong version of my board and reading the wrong pins.

So what's sucking up the power? Oh, there's also a couple blue wires off pins 8 & 9 running to the coin door. Alright, let's disconnect that... again. Because this isn't the first time I tested the game without a coin door. Or another door, I have 3 now. I'm assuming from all the testing and minor fixes I did along this long process of troubleshooting, I fixed something that made a difference.

Oh well, I won't complain, it's working pretty damn nice. No controls in place outside of player 1 & 2 buttons, I need to clean the leafs and fix a broken connection there. But hell, this is what I needed to have accomplished to start on the wrap up process to have this game completed.

Today was a good day.

13741252_1643333039244571_1370173819_n.jpg

I've been looking at this asteroids restore and you're doing some great work. Glad you fixed it and I also fixed my asteroids deluxe today :D
 
Big progress now that the video works, but as with anything, more little things got in the way.

For instance. Some farthead thought it would be a good idea to solder the spade connectors to the leaf switches. So I had to de-solder those so I could clean out the leaf/button recess. A couple wires also just frayed off from their clips, oh yeah, I ran out of that size. A temporary fix in the meantime and the control panel is all clean and put together.

Getting the vertical-grade laminate on the front wasn't too hard. I used a laminate-cutting hand tool from Amazon and it went pretty well. Getting the hole large enough for the coin door took a few tries to get it larger, my line drawing when I placed the laminate over to trace the opening wasn't perfect. I used DAP Weldwood Contact Cement, let it dry about 5 minutes in 90+ heat, and used a j-roller to press it into place.

Need to figure out how the CP & plexi goes together. Right now, the CP is extending out of the cabinet a little bit, it looks like it wants to go into the cabinet more, but that can't happen since the plexi is there.

Speaking of the plexiglass, it's horrible. I have a Novus kit ready to go for it, I'm waiting to be surprised.

How do people attach the cardboard bezel to the cabinet without staples? Seems like if I had to pull the tube out (hopefully that's not a common occurrence) I'd have to rip out staples, the top and bottom border is already pretty shredded from multiple staples being removed. Right now I just have it sitting in there with the plexi pushed against it, but it's not perfect.

Now that I've had some time to play the game (and my wife had her first game of Asteroids...ever!) I am noticing an issue. The display seems to favor the top part of the screen. I adjusted the X & Y size pots, but the bottom is still far off, maybe an inch or two. The high-score text isn't near the high-score text that's burned in on the tube.

Also, towards the top 1/4" of the screen, objects seem to scale down as they approach the top, and get larger as they approach the center of the screen. I know I've seen info on this on the forums here and elsewhere so hopefully it's not too involved.

But hey, it's playable and we're enjoying it. JCH's High-Score Save + Internet upload has been ordered as well!
 

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Post a pic of your crosshatch pattern from test mode.

On most color vectors there are linearity adjustments on the game PCB, which allow you to adjust the geometry for the edges of the screen vs the center. However in black and white games, these adjustments are on the monitor. You want to adjust them, along with the size pots on the game board, so that the diagonal crosshatch lines are straight.

Note you may also have one or more bad DACs, or other issues in the analog video section as well, but see if it's a monitor adjustment issue first.
 
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