Electra Avenger - a game lost to time?

N8smith

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I have a chance to pick up a non working avenger. The owner said he turned the game on, the screen went bright for a moment, heard some speaker hum, then nothing. The cabinet has pretty substantial water damage.

I am having trouble finding any info on this game. There's only 3 entries in vaps. I'm not even sure what the gameplay is like. There's one video on YouTube but it's not a fully functional game.

Is there any hope bringing this back to life or will it end up getting parted out? Am I wasting my time and money... ok don't answer that.

Thoughts?
 
Ya I've been watching it because it looked so cool. It's why I want to pick up this one locally. But I'm afraid it will turn in to a garage potato if there's no fixing it.
 
I'm not familiar with this game but since you appreciate it that much I think you should just grab it if the price is right and see what you can do with it. Edit: I looked it up, pretty cool. It is obscure though and your concerns are legit...
 
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I'm biased towards restoring anything that's at least semi-rare, so my questions and requests are:

- How much does/did getting it cost?

- Show us some pics and we'll have an idea of how much of a project restoring the cab is.

If it has custom chips and/or has EPROMs that haven't yet been dumped for MAME that could be a serious complication, however if it's a TTL/microprocessor-less board like say Monaco GP or Death Race then it should be fixable by someone qualified, though probably a major pain in the ass to do so.

Edit: found this on Youtube, although it doesn't show much:

 
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I'm definitely going to pick it up, it's cheap enough to gamble on.
Its from 1975 so it's pretty much garunteed to be ttl, right?
I found a manual and schematics on eBay. Hopefully complete. I'll be scanning them and uploading them somewhere for those who come after me. Does ArcArc take submissions?
 
Made a tiny bit of headway on this. Found a broken split pin on the power cord. Replaced it. Now when turned on the black and white monitor goes all white. Contrast and brightness adjustment does nothing. If I unplug the pcb edge connector the jet sound plays, otherwise no sound. Getting a lot of voltage drop between the ps and the board but the chips are at 4.9 after cranking it up all the way. Ps caps are questionable. Getting to much ripple?

Next steps are testing monitor on another game, putting a switcher in to bypass the ps, then hard core board level troubleshooting. This will be a learning experience.

Posted a WTB for a good board.

Anyone else have any suggestions?
 
There was an Avenger for sale near Toronto a couple years back. Don't know if it ever sold. It would appear for $500, then $750, then $450.... owner could never sell it I think. It was listed as not working however all manuals and schematics would be included so a new owner could get it running.

If I see it again I'll post a link in here.

Personally, I think you should invest some time and energy to get a game like Avenger going. Save this piece of arcade history while u can.
 
So it appears this game isn't as broken as I suspected. Thanks to CoinDork powering through near heat stroke (it was probably 115 in the garage), we got the monitor recapped and adjusted. Also, I found the credit switches had a bad connector pin. The combo of bad monitor and not being able to coin up and make noise led me to believe it was dead, but come to find out this sucker works! It has an issue with the plane Sprite tho. The left half is a block. Maybe I'll be able to figure something out about that...
 

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Its alive!!! Really neat to see something rare like that come back to life after god knows how long. Cant be too many of those suckers left in the world.
 
I'm definitely going to pick it up, it's cheap enough to gamble on.
Its from 1975 so it's pretty much garunteed to be ttl, right?
I found a manual and schematics on eBay. Hopefully complete. I'll be scanning them and uploading them somewhere for those who come after me. Does ArcArc take submissions?

On something that old you might run across DTL logic chips.
the logic is the same butthe Bias voltage might be different.
The fan out might cause you an issue if you sub in TTL.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan-out
 
Just picked one of these up and could really use the schematics or at least a pinout. Has anyone been able to get any documents uploaded?
 
Schematics uploaded

Hey guys, thanks to N8smith, I was able to upload schematics and the operator manual. I finally got mine but I am experiencing a few issues yet. the most annoying is the only point lights that work is the 40 point light. After a bit of troubleshooting, pin 13 of IJ-1 is staying high, preventing the other lamps from turning on. I have replaced several other components, so if anyone is smart on these, feel free to let me know.

https://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=6977
 
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