Fun internal Atari memo about Pole Position

Scucci

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Was printing out and reading the memos... found the one I was looking for. Got bored and retyped it.

Just a little insight as to why these things are such a PITA sometimes.

April 18, 1983


Dear Mr. Tashiro:

I must thank you again for your help and cooperation during my stay in Japan. We have implemented the changes that we talked about in our Pole Position boards and we have not had any recurring reset problems. However, I must request your company's assistance again.

We are having problems with the custom 07 chips recently. I would like to emphasize that this is not a small problem. Our recent shipment of fifty Pole Position games to one of our distributors had synchronization failures with all fifty games. Our distributor requested immediate replacement of failed chips and they were very upset about this incident. Immediately after this incident we started sampling out production line games for failures. To do this we tested 8 sample games for 1 day at room temperature. Within a couple of hours 3 games had failed. By the end of 24 hours, 5 of the 8 games had failed, all apparently due to custom 07 chip-related problems. My face is red; never in Atari's recent history has such an embarrassing situation as this happened.

Let me explain the problem in a more technical way in the following steps:
  1. We are required to use a metal (RFI) cage to comply with the F.C.C. rules in the USA. We have used this cage in all Pole Position games that we have shipped up until now.

  2. In this cage there is a temperature build up because it is an enclosed box. The ambient temperature of 32ºC inside the cabinet brings the temperature inside the cage up to 50ºC. In the hotter arcades, of course, this could go higher but never over 70ºC.

  3. In the industry specification, operating temperature for IC's is 0º – 70ºC. Most of the time IC's operate in ranges better than those given specs. However, we never push IC's over their operating specs.

  4. The games are failing when they are turned on for an hour or two because of the custom 07 chips. Failure occurs when the temperature inside the cage is about 50ºC ±5ºC.

  5. The custom 07 chips that are failing seem to have more than one date code. So far, the ones that are affected have the numbers 0798, 0792, and 0715. These parts seem to be your latest shipment to us. When we replace the failing chips with other date codes, the problem goes away no matter how hot the chips get (by external heating up to 90ºC). Of course, not all of the chips with the above date codes fail but the majority of them do.

  6. I had a chance to study these failing custom 07 chips in the short time that I had and as far as I can see there is a propagation delay problem in the custom 07 chips. As you know the HRESET signal comes after every 384 counts and resets all of the counters. However, when it is hot and starts to fail it counts only to 380. There are two custom 07 chips in the Pole Position boards and when one starts resetting at 380 counts the problems start appearing.

  7. I am convinced that you are getting some inferior parts from the Manufacturer that you are buying these custom chips from. You may have already seen the problem on your own boards but maybe not as bad as we have.


We have another production run coming up in a few weeks and I do not have any good solutions as to how to handle this problem. We have thousands of custom 07 chips in stock and every one of them could be bad. I do not have a good way to screen them and, as you know, I cannot ask our Q.A. Department to heat everything board to 40ºC to 50ºC temperature to try to determine whether the problem occurs. Even if it fails, what will I tell them to replace the bad custom 07 chip with? You see my problem and why my face is red.

I urgently ask your assistance in the matter and hope to get some answers as soon as possible. I am confident that, as usual, your expertise and cooperation is going to help us once more, as it has in the past. Again, domo arrigatto for your help.

Yours truly,
Sam Deus

So, as you can see... there were Pole Positions failing left and right back in the day as well. 50 in one shot and some couldn't even make it out of the factory.

Once you're sure you're getting good juice to the boards, making sure they don't over heat is the next obstacle. If you're running the boards with the filterboard still attached, then that's going to be blocking a LOT of the airflow to the boards. Adding fans underneath or above them blowing/pulling air across the boards couldn't hurt anything. In most cases, I am sure reasonably sure that just adding the extra cooling will be enough to keep the boards stable'sh.

I ghetto rigged a couple of 12VDC fans to the back of my cage blowing across the boards. With those fans, even with the boards back in the cage, I have over 10 hours of steady burn in on the boards. Rock solid so far. If this keeps up, I'll finally (after some 3 years on-again off-again tinkering) call this game finished and I won't have to worry about it again for a while.
 
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Another thing that will greatly help......get rid of those damn cages! Buy some of those multiboard pcb feet Bob Roberts sells, and mount those boards without the cage.

Edward
 
Wow I know the game is prone to failure, but I didn't know it was that flaky even before leaving the factory! My machine is very temperamental and only works when it wants to it seems.
 
Bumping this great thread, has anyone tried arctic silver and a heat sink and fan on the chip?

Does Galaga use this same chip?
 
Bumping this great thread, has anyone tried arctic silver and a heat sink and fan on the chip?

Does Galaga use this same chip?

I haven't put any heat sink on the chips, but I do still have that fan on there and I haven't had as much as a hiccup from the boards since adding that fan. It doesn't look like I updated this thread, but I actually left the machine on for a few days solid... no issues from it at all.

Pole Position, Galaga, Mappy, DigDug, Bosconian, Super-Pac, and Xevious all use the 07XX chips they were mentioning in the memo. I'm not sure if any of them suffer from the same issues as Pole Position though... But it might be something to keep an eye out for in the future.

http://www.multigame.com/NAMCO.html
 
I actually found and downloaded a whole slew of internal office memos about Pole Position. It seems to have been a buggy game the whole time.
 
At some point, Atari released a bulletin, telling operators to "add a fan" (later productions runs left the factory with a fan).

Edward
 
I have never had a problem with either of my Pole Positions. I had 1 monitor fail, but both my PP1 and PP2 are both running their original and untouched power supplies, original ARIIs, and of course, all original boardsets.
 
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