Galaga Hates me!

[mrbill08]

Stupid California don't like us to have freeze spray. Thank god upside down can's of air works and I am thankful for fellow techs and friends who ship freeze spray to me.

Plus one on the good call..

You can always do the opposite - chill the board and start heating individual chips until it fails (or starts working). I use forced air from my pancake compressor for cooling parts instead of freeze mist and it works well for a mojority of those types of problems.

Bill

 

[nuterpacman]

galaga

I remember i had a weird galaga once that hard time powering up and also when it did run would crash at other times. no pattern to it.
After hours of testing, swapping,etc..., i found the light fixture was "f" ing it up. I disconnected the light fixture and the game work perfectly. Weird but true.

 

[kb0jjn]

I remember i had a weird galaga once that hard time powering up and also when it did run would crash at other times. no pattern to it.
After hours of testing, swapping,etc..., i found the light fixture was "f" ing it up. I disconnected the light fixture and the game work perfectly. Weird but true.

The Strangest thing I found recently. I found if I take a pic of a running Galaga board It would do very strange things. It would act like you took control of the ship in demo mode. It usually would reset. The camera is a Nikon digital camera and nothing special.

This problem I am still scratching my head and wonder why this would be. I have had radios that would only work upside down.

I fixed it by grounding the power supply.

 

[Mike Doyle]

I've had Galaga boards in the past that were very sensitive to voltage settings, some liked the 5v line to run around 5v, others wouldn't work unless it was 5.15v, and still others wanted 4.9v.

I have also seen sensitivity to Z80 speeds, and had boards that needed Z80a's in the second and third sockets with a regular Z80 in the first socket.

Galaga self-test only checks the first Z80 IIRC, what speeds are you using?

 

[channelmanic]

Galaga runs the first Z80 during self tests. The others sit there with the reset line held low until the cross hatch screen comes up. If the other 2 don't come up then it will just reset itself thanks to the watchdog.

 

[kb0jjn]

I've had Galaga boards in the past that were very sensitive to voltage settings, some liked the 5v line to run around 5v, others wouldn't work unless it was 5.15v, and still others wanted 4.9v.

I have also seen sensitivity to Z80 speeds, and had boards that needed Z80a's in the second and third sockets with a regular Z80 in the first socket.

Galaga self-test only checks the first Z80 IIRC, what speeds are you using?

The first one is a z80a and the other two are standard z80.

I have one working board set that has the first z80 and the second is a z80a, and third is a z80. The first has not been changed as it is soldered to the board.

I have another board set that had all z80a's. These boards are extremely touchy until you replace all of the sockets.

 

[CrazyKongFan]

The Strangest thing I found recently. I found if I take a pic of a running Galaga board It would do very strange things. It would act like you took control of the ship in demo mode. It usually would reset. The camera is a Nikon digital camera and nothing special.

Some ROMsets, you actually can control the ship. When the ship is under the tractor beam, hit the fire button and shoot it, then you'll have control after that. I don't know if I've seen a regular Galaga that does it, but it definitely works on the Ms Pac/Galaga reunion cabs. Seems to work in MAME on all the various ROMsets.

 

[channelmanic]

It's a bug in the Ms. Pac/Galaga reunion cabs.

I had fun showing that to the guys at one of the local Dave & Busters.