Robotron Start-up Issue...

obs

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Hi All..

I plugged in my Upgright Ronotron for the first time in 5 years. When it was plugged in, I heard the monitor do its thing...took 10 secs to juice up fully before I got a picture on the screen.

the issue is, when I finally saw a pattern on the monitor, it was a carpet pattern (See Pic).

I had to numeric LED lit on the boardset (also se pic).

I removed the battery's. (Yes..I left them in for 5 + years...NO corrosion at all and there is still 1.5 plus volts in each battery).

I restared the game...same carpet pattern...but about 20 secs later, the familiar "Extra Man" bit played...and now I have a working game.

Any idea what could cause this delay?? I'll try to re-creat the issue and take a vid of it.

Tnx..


Carpet Pattern Link - https://truck.it/p/TwE4YPKUO5
Board pic link - https://truck.it/p/ZNl6Y3PCb4


Dave
 
One or more of the RAMs may have had some corrosion on the legs and running power to them forced a connection through the corrosion. The same could be true of the connectors.

After letting a game sit for more than a month I always pull and reseat all of the connectors to remove any oxidation or corrosion on them. And press down all of the chips just to make sure none of them have popped up. This can also help any oxidation on the legs by "breaking" them loose in the sockets.

ken
 
I had the same issue with my Robotron I recently acquired. The game had been stored for over eight years, with the batteries still installed. The rom board was flaky when powered up after all that time. I did remove the batteries, some corrosion on the battery holder. I replaced the old holder with a Bob Roberts battery kit. I had to reseat all the roms chips and reseat the 18 ram chips. I removed all the molex connectors from the boards and checked for loose pins and cold solder points. Any chip that was mounted in a socket I removed and reseated.

This fixed 95% of my problems with the game. I would replace any brittle molex connectors, again Bob sells kits for replements.

The game plays well and stable.
 
Definitely change that battery holder out with the Bob Roberts replacement, I've never seen one of the disk batteries corrode. More than likely you had some bad connections. If you're going to keep the game I would bullet proof as much as you can with a RAM upgrade and change all the connectors, especially anything dealing with power. I used to lose RAM pretty regular until I upgraded them, haven't had one die since and it's been years. http://www.robotron-2084.co.uk/techwilliams4164.html
 
The "rug test" on the Williams boards is testing RAM. In a normal situation where the RAM tests good, you will see two "swipes" across the rug, then the screen will clear and the game will start. If the RAM test fails then the test repeats a certain number of times, and if the RAM finally tests good then the game will start. Otherwise, after some number of passes (I can't remember, and it might change per game), the system will simply halt.

If the rug test is taking a long time then I would suspect one or more of the DRAMs is failing, which they are known to do.
 
Everything everyone has said seems to ring true.

The numbers on the board are the ram column and row.

Check your power supply voltages as well. Low voltage can flag ram errors, but more than likely, you did in fact end up blasting a minor resistance issue out of existence.
 
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