How Much of a PITA is Maintaining a BattleZone???

Michael Roma

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Thinking about working a trade for a working BZ but remember a fellow collector adamantly telling me that he will never get one again because the are a pain to maintain.

What say you???

- Mike
 
Just get the board bulletproofed with replacing the cheesy Atari socketed ICs and you should be golden. The only trouble i had with mine after that was the ribbon cables, I replaced those along with the header pins, everything was golden after that!
 
on mine i reflowed pins, i rebuilt the ar2, i replaced bad sockets, i put in a hs save kit....


worked for 3 mos and pooped out, booted up to game over screen....


I no longer own it... f-that...
 
I don't own one but I had a similiar conversation with Anthony Ramos (Ground Kontrol). He also mentioned what a PITA Battlezone is but he must really love it because I showed up with a Battlezone caberet and he was as giddy as hell.

I don't care what a PITA a game may be - if you love the game isn't it worth the hassle?
 
Its as reliable as any other vector... Same typical problems the other Atari vectors have. I got mine working and its been fine for a year now. I've had way more problems with Asteroids than B.Z. - I think its one of those paranoid things, I keep hearing over and over that they're unreliable yet all my friends with them have little problems but usually keep running and running and running...
 
Thinking about working a trade for a working BZ but remember a fellow collector adamantly telling me that he will never get one again because the are a pain to maintain.

What say you???

- Mike

I have had one for maybe 7 years now. I have some spare boards around. I had to swap the math box board out not long ago but I'm guessing it's something minor with that. The big pain about them is the interconnect cable. The best thing to do there like someone mentioned is to replace all the header pins and maybe the cable itself. The sockets can be a pain too but I have one replaced one in the past and that was a small prom socket on the math box. The high score save kit replaces the roms on the main board so that can help. I'm not selling mine if that tells you something.
 
Only trouble I ever had was the interconnect cable. Otherwise, it ran fine for more than a year and a half and the board had never been messed with.
 
I've had mine for about a year.

It was shopped out when I got it and it's held up pretty well.

ARII board developed a problem that Alex @ ElektronForge fixed inexpensively.

Joystick handle piece broke and I replaced it with a NOS one from Mylstar.

I put a HS save kit in it pretty recently and am happy with that.

I haven't played it a whole hell of a lot (that part is coming soon enough) but I think it's been reasonable.
 
If it has been abused and not maintained very well it will give you nightmares. If it has been taken care of it is no nig hairy deal.
 
I've had mine for 28 years. Sum total of the maintenance: I've replaced one grommet last year that was torn when I got it (I'll probably replace the other to keep the set feeling the same). Dusted the mirror and the monitor. Reseated chips and cables. Tweaked the brightness and X-Y positioning on the monitor. Oh, and replaced 2 fluorescent starters.

I've added a step from a different Battlezone and I'll be replacing the matting on it.

Total. 28 years. 4 major moves (Chicago to Chicago to Denver to Houston to Humble). They are really touchy little prima donnas. ;)

ken
 
I just pulled mine out of my arcade, fcking dead AGAIN! Guess what, within a week of BZ dying, Tempest dies too!!! Very frustating. I'm putting one of those vector multigames in the BZ now so I can play Red Baron it in too. It's costing $500 to have Dangerwil in Jaxsonville do the conversion for me, but I got that much in this BZ over the last two years any way. PLUS I now have two spare rebuilt monitors for the BZ. The problem is this: they are great games, so as much of a bitch as it is when they die, everybody that comes into my arcade wants to play them and I loved them as a kid, so they're keepers, no matter how much it costs.
 
Great... Tron's been giving me enough worries (doesn't like the power the mall's giving to the arcade) and I'm going to pick my BZ up this coming week. Luckily it's been in the same location since it was delivered from the factory... but I've always heard they're beasts (on average) to keep happy. Hopefully I'll luck out?... The boards are dead right now (went out 6 years ago), but since that was 2002sh, it made it from 1980 to 2002 with only minor maintence... so hopefully she'll behave when I get her up and running at home.
 
I don't care what a PITA a game may be - if you love the game isn't it worth the hassle?

I agree. My Battlezone has had its issues, mainly with the interconnect and one time the crystal blew out, but I would not trade it for anything.

ArcadeMaze
 
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