Help! My Tempest is being mean to me!!

SkippyJoe777

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So my Tempest was working great until yesterday the monitor collapsed. I put my Space Duel monitor into the Tempest then all hell broke loose. the first thing I noticed was that all of the High scores erased and are now replaced wih the (Binary) score of 10101. The machine will coin-up but will not start.

On the part 1 self test you can see that two of the icons are both zero and one. None of the controls work except the test switch so I cannot progress any further than that.

On Part 2 self test there is a long tone and it is hard to tell from the Picture but there is a 7 in the left corner with a CE below it and a Q above the test icons.

I am having a hard time figuring out what the problem is by the manual. It looks like the 7 means K-1 ROM is bad butwhat is CE??

Any help would be GREATLY appreciated!
 

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Problems changed

So I pulled K-1 and reseated it now the 7 and CE in test mode 2 are gone.

Now in test mode 1 the high scores and times keep erasing by themselves without me initiating it and the 7th and 8th icons in the game difficulty line are still showing 1 and 0 at the same time as per the pic in my initial post.

In test mode 2 there is a single continuous tone so I THINK that means a possibly bad RAM chip at R2 (If I am wrong please somebody chime in) and the only failure I see right now is Q for Audio 2 which I assume has nothing to do with the game lockup.

The scores still read binary code 10101

Can R2 RAM cause all this?? Or is there something more sinister going on?
 
Last edited:
Replace the pokey to fix the Q error.

Pokeys also handle inputs, so your game thinks there are currently buttons being pressed when there are not.

Also the constant sound is also most likely caused by the bad pokey.
 
New Pokeys did the trick. Thanks! I replaced Pokeys in a different Tempest a few years back but the symptoms were totally different. I would not have even thought to replace them!! Luckily I bought a few tubes of the chips when I did so I had some on hand. Thanks again!
 
The scores still read binary code 10101

These are the default scores. They are not binary, just an indication that the scores were either reset due to the pokey giving weird input in test or something is up with your EAROM circuitry.

Rack up some scores then flip the test switch and zero them out. They'll all go back to 10101. It's just the default.
 
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