tester007
Well-known member
I picked up that oddball Japanese Starhawk. Its a Vectorbeam version, 1978. Well as luck would have it, found another this week that the guy was giving away for free.. my first free game. This is an original one, and is a Cinematronics 1977 version.
So having 2, I now see a definite issue in the Vectorbeam one. Everything works fine in it, except for the bright vectors in the monitor. Now that I have the other one I can definietely see a difference. What would be the cause of that?
In the new Cinematronics one I had no life at all. Game was very dirty. I powered it up an imediately a tant cap on the sound board popped, and one on the monitor popped. So I replaced a bunch of caps, finding a couple on the monitor open. Now it would power on, and breakers would not pop. But nothing. So I swapped in the working Vectorbeam board and the game works fine. Monitor looks very nice. Sad thing is is the speaker is dead.. really sucks because it looks like a vintage item the way it is made, the basket.... Anyways, so the Cine pcb is dead.
I compared it to the Vectorbeam one and although most things are similar, there are quite a few 74's that are different. So I couldn't really compare to find out what some of the chips are on the Cine pcb as some of the marking are very faint. One chip though that caught my eye is at row 14, 5th chip from the end (its different on both boards). It has on it MI-7603-5 (if anything else its faded off), and 7834 below that. Anyone know what this chip is? It gets 'extremely' hot when board is on. Is this normal? Its hot enough to make the chips on either side very hot as well..
So having 2, I now see a definite issue in the Vectorbeam one. Everything works fine in it, except for the bright vectors in the monitor. Now that I have the other one I can definietely see a difference. What would be the cause of that?
In the new Cinematronics one I had no life at all. Game was very dirty. I powered it up an imediately a tant cap on the sound board popped, and one on the monitor popped. So I replaced a bunch of caps, finding a couple on the monitor open. Now it would power on, and breakers would not pop. But nothing. So I swapped in the working Vectorbeam board and the game works fine. Monitor looks very nice. Sad thing is is the speaker is dead.. really sucks because it looks like a vintage item the way it is made, the basket.... Anyways, so the Cine pcb is dead.
I compared it to the Vectorbeam one and although most things are similar, there are quite a few 74's that are different. So I couldn't really compare to find out what some of the chips are on the Cine pcb as some of the marking are very faint. One chip though that caught my eye is at row 14, 5th chip from the end (its different on both boards). It has on it MI-7603-5 (if anything else its faded off), and 7834 below that. Anyone know what this chip is? It gets 'extremely' hot when board is on. Is this normal? Its hot enough to make the chips on either side very hot as well..