Star Wars, Vector problems

TyRoden

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I have a Star Wars that I have been working on that was quite dead, and over the last few weeks I have managed to get it close to working properly.

The main issue I am having is dealing with the game logic seemingly, where the game paints the screen mostly normally (all deflection circuits are up and happy at this time). The game logic itself seems to be the problem:

1) the Tie Fighters get drawn very incorrectly
2) the stars are missing
3) gameplay will not progress past the fly in to the Deathstar. The Deathstar appears at about quarter sized and never magnifies with you moving in to it. You can shoot and move controls, but the game is forever staying away from the Deathstar ;-)

I have two boardsets, though the second boardset does not work at all. I may be able to swap certain chips from one to the other however if you have any good candidates.

Here is a video where you can see what the game is doing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HhVQw0bpMpM

This is a really odd issue that I cannot seem to fix. I have verified proper operation (voltages) of the AR II, and all voltages seem to be in order elsewhere - I have checked 5V at the gameboard as well, and it is spot on. The HV is running a bit low (roughly 16K with HV probe) but that should not affect this I would imagine.

Thank you in advance for any insight you can pass along.

-Ty
 
Try swapping chip 7k from your other board. If that doesn't do it, then try one of the other two socketed chips right next to it. Can't remember those chip numbers off hand.
 
It will go into self test mode, but the operator that had this machine removed the auxilliary coin switch and wires. I have yet to trace down what exactly to short elsewhere to trigger the aux coin to be able to make progress in the self test screens.

I will swap 7k and the other chips if necessary and report back. Thank you.
 
Ok - I have swapped in all 4 of the socketed chips, one at a time. The symptoms remain unaffected however. The chips are 7H, 7J, 7K and 7L, and are all the Atari copyrighted ones.

Any other possibilities?
 
Based on the video, would a bad AVG chip paint every other set of vectors, yet drop just the ships and stars in this fashion? I am not familiar with the operation of the AVG chip enough to follow on this one. Anyone have any overview theory of operation on this off the top of their head, Im curious. Thanks.
 
I would agree with Tronfreak, it's not an AVG board problem, it's a CPU side problem. Could be a bad prom, or socket. Errors with those chips generally won't show on the Self Test.
 
Have you inspected/cleaned the inside surface of the pins on each socketed chip?

Those pesky single sided sockets only make contact on the inside of the leg.
 
Ok - another follow up on this one.

The chip sockets all test out ok as best as I can test them, and the solder has been re-flowed on each pin point.

I have also swapped the 2128-3 RAMs on the board with no success (Just in case).

Any other logical choices to check next?

Thank you.
 
To answer the ROM cleaning part - yes I have cleaned the chips, and I have swapped in ROMs from my second boardset - the problems have stayed the same unfortunately. I will not rule out a bad socket perhaps. I will order in some good sockets. Any other ideas, or further verification I can try?

Thank you.
 
Just ran across this TT from Atari. Perhaps it's the answer you are looking for.

tt-010-sw.JPG
 
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