After the rules and scores go by the screen starts flashing red to blue rapidly and stays like that until you either start a game or power cycle the game. On a normal working game how long does the screen toggle rapidly from blue to red? It seems to get stuck at this point.
Once both "HIGH SCORES" and "(c) 1981 SEGA" appear on the screen it quickly flashes to red, where it stays for about 3 seconds. Then it fades to black and the attract mode starts over.
Also how often does the attract mode voice come on? I hear it during power up and right after you finish a game when you put your initials in. Can anybody who has an Astro Blaster help me?
If you're talking about "Fighter pilots needed in sector wars. Play Astro Blaster," it seems to be kinda random. It does it every time at first power up but after that it's sporadic. If you heard it when entering your initials I'd say that's random or it was just a conincidence, as it usually doesn't do that. It said it once when I coined up, but it only happened that one time.
It talks quite a bit during game play. When the game begins it says, "Alert! Alert! Invader in sector one. Player to battle stations." If you fire too much and it goes into the red it says, "Laser temperature critical," and if it reaches the end of the gauge it says, "Laser overheated."
Other phrases include "fuel status marginal," "fuel added," "warp activated" (followed by a countdown from ten), and "standby for docking maneuver." Whenever you die it states how many ships you have remaining. When you have one left it adds, "Exercise extreme caution." When you lose your last ship it says, "Zero ships remaining. Play over" (
not "game over").
I let the attract mode run in MAME for about 10 minutes. It said, "Fighter pilots needed in sector wars. Play Astro Blaster" at first power up at the beginning of the first attract mode loop. It went through a second loop without saying anything. Then I heard it again at the start of the third loop. But that pattern (one off, one on) did not repeat. I don't know if it is supposed to be every 'x' number of attract mode loops or it is on a timer or if it just truly random.