Atari Canyon Bomber Restoration

[greedycrisp]

So today was good and bad.

The good: I got the Canyon Bomber board working !
The bad: It was Hisnice's Canyon Bomber board !

His board, as seen in the post above, was displaying multiple vertical dirigibles which the user manual confusingly refers to as a 'plane'. ( Actually the sentence in the manual is "The airplane picture ROM...is programmed to provide 32 bits of data for each of the 16 lines of each of the four plane pictures of a car." Go ahead, read that a few more times. )

Anyway, since we had determined RAM was good the most likely culprit was one of the vertical line comparators. @maberle pulled, socketed, and replaced both (since they both tested good) and voila, working board. Good stuff.

My board is stuck at this stage:



First the playfield is not displaying correctly. I suspect the graphics prom (N82S137F) but don't have the skills \ tools to test it. At least today. I'm trying to source a replacement but would also appreciate suggestions as to what's needed to test and to fix the issue myself.

Second, the duplicated lines of text and corrupted text shown at the top. I actually think this is causing the first issue: Duplicated lines are overwriting the playfield. Notice the numbers in the rocks are exactly the same multiple times in the affected canyon walls lines.

Im hestitant to shotgun replacement of chips without further study of the manual or determining status of the prom. Will think on the issue a bit, any suggestions would be appreciated.

 

[hisnice]

Sounds like Good News, Good News to me. Thank you!

And now at least we have a working board to compare with... Feeling confident that you're getting closer and closer with yours, too.

 

[mikenes75513]

You can check the 74174 flip-flops at j3 and k3 in circuit to see if they are behaving how they should. In fact, I had a similar flip-flop go out on missile command that caused some strange behavior.

 

[greedycrisp]

From this


to this


Thanks to @lilypad19 for working through this with me for many minutes, and for @maberle for hosting the work bench.

Picture one above shows the issue, duplicated rows of horizontal game field. My thought was the PROM was feeding bad images into RAM or a timer was malfunctioning. The issue turned out to be in the RAM: a jumped bus 1 to bus 15 under one of the RAM sockets. I had pulled, socketed & replaced RAM to get the board to where it was in the first picture above. This introduced the short, so the RAM was getting in garbage.

Now on to the 'easy' parts of the board, fixing the onboard voltage regulator and testing the sound.

 

[greedycrisp]

Getting back into this. Slight detour today with @maberle, @gregafree and @lilypad19 learning to use the FPGA CAT box. So of course I need to select a game that has no known configuration file to learn on: Canyon Bomber !

A look at the hardware and RAM map on Subs (also Atari 1977) makes it appear that part of that config file may work for CB. So Ill try that as soon as I can get a CPU adapter that will fit into this type of funky CPU socket:



Hard to see but the construction prevents a sacrificial socket or adapter from getting a firm placement. The socket only wants a chip. Will need to get creative.

 

[cwilkson]

You need the mill-max socket with the extra long pins. Not the wire wrap. There's on series that gives yo another 50 mils of length on the skinny part of the pins.

Or…get a dead DIP IC and cut out its guts. Then solder a normal socket on top.

 

[greedycrisp]

Ill look for the mill-max. In the mean-time, wire- wrap socket with the pins shaved from .0335" down to .0135" fits well. Hard to get a good picture.



Pins on the FPGA CAT adapters are .02" to .0195" thick; pins on the actual chip are about .0130". So this may work, though the adapter into the wire-wrap is a bit loose.

 

[cwilkson]

Be careful with that. The posts are usually not all oriented the same. So even if they're only 0.0135" thick in one dimension the diagonal can still be well over 0.030". And that will blow out the socket.

 

[hisnice]

Did you try the edge connector instead?

 

[lilypad19]

Did you try the edge connector instead?

On the 6502. If you use the edge connector, you still need to plug the 6502 adapter in. It has a jumper built in that is necessary.

 

[greedycrisp]

This cab has been sitting with a graphic artist for 6 months. Since it was silk screened on vinyl I was hoping he could a paint refresh as he did with my Dogpatch, but alas he's too busy with actual work-work so it has to stay as-is for a while.

My Fire Escape is complete and Lunar Lander is pending a PCB repair so I'm committing to getting back to this starting this week. I'll be taking inventory of where I left off and attacking it immediately.

 

[greedycrisp]

Changing direction on this but only slightly. Initially I was going to work on electronics while the cab paint work was being touched up by someone else. Now having someone else do the paint is out but I don't want to deal with it myself right now. Too deep in the hands-on work at the moment. So I'll focus on getting everything with the cab except the artwork done.

Today was getting the bottom in shape. One of the legs ripped out at some time in the past, the cab was limping on three feet. Removed the old ones, cleaned up the wood, coat of varnish to seal it against future mopping accidents. New feet with stronger hardware will be installed.

 

[greedycrisp]

Test of polishing up the black laminate. Right end of the board is the current state, the line where I stopped is pretty evident.



Has anyone found a currently available laminate to match the old, black Atari finish as in this pic ? Lunar Lander, Asteroids, etc?

 

[cwilkson]

Test of polishing up the black laminate. Right end of the board is the current state, the line where I stopped is pretty evident.

View attachment 745877

Has anyone found a currently available laminate to match the old, black Atari finish as in this pic ? Lunar Lander, Asteroids, etc?

How are you polishing that?
It looks pretty good!

 

[ArcadeTechGW]

Your work and attention to detail is awesome! Keep going!

 

[greedycrisp]

Couple of hard days down in the mines.

Saturday was stripping control panels to get replacements for the CB control panel button frames and for another upcoming restore. Derusting parts with combination of soaking and wirebrushing.



Sunday was power scrubbing the remaining dust from the inside of the cabinet, and washing the outer sides of the cab.

The connectors, screws, and anything else metal in the lower part of the CB cab are rusted and corroded pretty much beyond use. I don't think the 44 pin connector is supposed to be that green. Test switch is inoperable. Corrosion may be removable from some things but it may be wiser to re-pin the wiring harness connectors for many of these.

 

[vintagegamer]

I have no memory of that game. Very cool!!

 

[greedycrisp]

How are you polishing that?
It looks pretty good!

Wiping varnish with a little bit of black tint.

 

[greedycrisp]

Cabinet wiring harness is done (hopefully) except for the 44 pin board connector, I didn't have any on hand. I saved a few of the male pins by dremel brushing them but most of the female ones just got changed. They were filthy, corroded, and whatever. I don't like shotgunning connectors but I thought it was just better to get it over with and deal with the consequences later.

Swapped out the rusted wood screws with new ones, replaced some of the wiring harness ties and anchors at the same time.

 

[greedycrisp]

Looking for the best finish material for the bottom corner I need to replace. I ordered Wilsonart and Metro laminate samples, they seem to be taking their time in shipping. In the meantime im experimenting with various woods and finishes,



Cut out switch replaced. Start switch replaced. Waiting on the correct rivets to reconstruct the test-switch assembly.

44 pin edge connector re-pinned at an interminable length and extravagant cost. Does anyone know where to buy these gold-plated connectors at under $1 a pin? Anyone?



The flourescent fixture still works. Cleaned it, de-rusted, hitting it with fresh paint.