She's alive! She's ALIVE! Mazer Blazer LIVES!

SRW

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Well Ian (retrohacker) has done it again! He has Mazer Blazer up and running!

There isn't a game made he can't fix! :)

I'll let him comment on the details of the repairs but here are a few pics. Keep in mind that unless you are right in front of the screen (which the camera wasn't) it looks weird because of the magnification lens.

Oh Yeah... this game is AWESOME to play!
 

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Nice Steve! I wonder what he found on the repair side, curious myself! Take some more pictures when you get it in your collection!

-Jim
 
Yup - add this game to the list of things that rose from the dead on Halloween - along with that Warrior...

As it was, the game was dead. Fiddling with the output connector on the isolation transformer brought the monitor up, only to display a pattern of horizontal green and white lines.

Anyway, this game had a bad case of battery acid corrosion on the CPU board. The battery had leaked and destroyed an I/O decoder chip (74LS139), caused damage to the clock generator circuit, and had eaten away a lot of the copper traces around the chip. Repair was rather involved, the solder was too corroded to melt, and just removing parts took a long time. The corrosion had thoroughly permeated the through-plating around the 139 and it's pads, I should have taken pictures, but it was a green fuzzy mess of crud.

After getting all the crud off, and sanding down that section of the board, I was able to repair the damage and mend the broken traces, fitting a new socket and a chip. Put it all back together, and it fired right up!

Played several games, it's actually a pretty good game - I like it. But I can also see why it would not have done well, it's not a spectator game - and even the player has to be lined up just right in order to see the screen clearly. The game was clearly not designed for adults, as you have to hunch down to play. It would be tempting to set the game up on cinder blocks....

The game cut out after half an hour, but that was quickly traced to a bad fuse connector - the wire that leads from the 5v rectifier bridge to the 10A fuse is clearly too small a gauge, and has melted and deformed over the years, and the spade connector is a nice crispy brown color. One wonders if this was what took the game out of service in the first place?

-Ian
 
Cool beans, thanks for the update you two! Nice to see another classic back in action!
 
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