Hey,
I finally got a Gravitar, which I've been trying to find for a long time. Anyway, it had a dead flyback on the Amplifone, so after fixing all the monitor related stuff, it had problem playing.
Basically, it only boots sometimes, and when it does, the text and other static objects seem to be wrong and/or in wrong places. The cool Gravitar attract screen works fine, but the title screen w/ text has either random text on it, or sometimes duplicates, and while the game plays just fine, there's some static characters randomly placed over the screen (and my ship's thrust is drawn in the center of the screen).
At first the game seemed to work completely fine only with an A/R II board from my Tempest... so I rebuilt the original w/ a Bob Roberts kit, and it still didn't work, then I tried putting the Tempest A/R back in, and it's the same problem, so it was probably just coincidence or slight adjustment difference why it worked then. But I've checked the voltages and made sure +5 was properly adjusted but (at least now) there's a consistent problem.
Self test never tells me anything good (at least to my knowledge)... some have blank screens, others draw just fine... others draw messed up (I think).
I'm not very familiar with the Atari hardware, so if anyone could give me a pointer to where I should start to attack the problem, I'd appreciate it. Attached are some pics:
Thanks,
DogP
I finally got a Gravitar, which I've been trying to find for a long time. Anyway, it had a dead flyback on the Amplifone, so after fixing all the monitor related stuff, it had problem playing.
Basically, it only boots sometimes, and when it does, the text and other static objects seem to be wrong and/or in wrong places. The cool Gravitar attract screen works fine, but the title screen w/ text has either random text on it, or sometimes duplicates, and while the game plays just fine, there's some static characters randomly placed over the screen (and my ship's thrust is drawn in the center of the screen).
At first the game seemed to work completely fine only with an A/R II board from my Tempest... so I rebuilt the original w/ a Bob Roberts kit, and it still didn't work, then I tried putting the Tempest A/R back in, and it's the same problem, so it was probably just coincidence or slight adjustment difference why it worked then. But I've checked the voltages and made sure +5 was properly adjusted but (at least now) there's a consistent problem.
Self test never tells me anything good (at least to my knowledge)... some have blank screens, others draw just fine... others draw messed up (I think).
I'm not very familiar with the Atari hardware, so if anyone could give me a pointer to where I should start to attack the problem, I'd appreciate it. Attached are some pics:
Thanks,
DogP
