Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

Picked up a free Battlezone a little while ago, which was AWESOME. Now comes the challenge of making it work. As far as I can tell, every part of the cabinet is dead.

I started by putting the cabinet on 5v and hooking it to the FPGA cat box. Everything failed. Several ROMs came up as bad, Every SINGLE RAM came up as bad.

Turned out to be one bad dataline for the RAM, and two actually bad RAM chips. Two ROMs were bad, one ROM socket was bad.

So all the ROM and RAM were therefore sorted. The machine would not boot still, continuing to watchdog. In for a penny, in for a pound...
So I built a complete test harness for Battlezone so it could get all of its required voltages at the bench level (and I could see output on my scope and hear potential beeping)

Here's what I've found thus far:

• All clocks referenced on the schematics page 02A (3rd edition) are good, as measured by my scope.
• All ROMs are good, as measured by the CAT Box
• All RAM is good, as measured by the CAT Box
• The 6502 Processor is good, as tested by my backbit pro. (I also tested a second CPU on the board to be sure)
• The vector generator seems to be working well enough that the CAT box is able to draw text on screen.
• The inputs are properly being read by the CAT Box

When turned on, with the processor installed, the watchdog is barking. Disabling the watchdog doesn't do anything, and neither does putting it into test mode from boot. No beeps, no boot, nothing.

I think my next step would be to do signature analysis on the math box, and see if any information can be gleaned from that... I'm hopeful anyway.