Tempest board repair/swap

I have Phet's Tempest board so i can fill in the blanks on what it is/isn't doing.

When i power it up, the LED comes on the board as it should but the player one and two buttons are both on and not blinking. Also, whatever is wrong with the main board, it's causing the LED on the monitor chassis to come on and stay on which is obviously shutting the monitor down at the same time. The board produces nothing at all on the screen, no pic. no spot killer, nothing but a black screen.

this is being tested in my working tempest which is all running perfect until i plug his board in. His AR2 is working fine, it's all main board related.
 
So, any ideas? Anyone repair these anymore or do swaps? I had started a thread or 2 about my 6100, now it seems this may have been a board issue all along. Someone mentioned a chip near one of the X pots that might be bad? Anything else on the CPU that would cause blooming-then vertical collapse-then nothing?
 
So, any ideas? Anyone repair these anymore or do swaps? I had started a thread or 2 about my 6100, now it seems this may have been a board issue all along. Someone mentioned a chip near one of the X pots that might be bad? Anything else on the CPU that would cause blooming-then vertical collapse-then nothing?
Alex at Elektronforge still repairs them but the problem lately is that he has a backlog of work that's not allowed him to take on any new repairs for now.
 
Can anyone vouch for Eldorado? How about Spaeth?
To me Eldorado is a bit pricey. I mean for the price they charge to "repair" your board you could just buy another working one. In fact their website has said repair to them means exchange. That's great for a fast turnaround time since they would just send you a working board and fix your broken one later so they can exchange it for someone else's broken board. Personally that would annoy me a little if I had a game with all matching serial numbers and they just sent me a different board. I'm a bit picky/anal about that stuff admittedly, but honestly for what they charge you might as well just buy another working board and keep your current for parts or future repair. Otherwise I would honestly look elsewhere if you want to have it repaired.
 
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Talon2000 does vector board repairs. He lives about 30 miles from me across the north side of the Dallas Metromess.
 
Does anything happen in self test mode? Flip the self-test switch, then power up the game (or press the reset button the AVG board). See if anything displays on the screen or if it beeps out any RAM failure tones. (see page 8 in the Tempest manual or page 1A of the schematics)

Chris, have you tried interswapping Phet's boards with yours to see if you can narrow the problem down to just his AUX or AVG board? Have the header pins for his interboard cable been resoldered? If you check at the X and Y test points on the AVG board, what sort of voltages do you see?

It sounds like the game is not playing blind, is that true? If it plays blind, then the failure is likely in the x or y output circuitry. If it's not playing at all, then the problem is somewhere deeper.

I'd offer to look at it, but I have no spare time in the near future, and my success rate at fixing Tempest boards is only about 50/50.

Alan

I have Phet's Tempest board so i can fill in the blanks on what it is/isn't doing.

When i power it up, the LED comes on the board as it should but the player one and two buttons are both on and not blinking. Also, whatever is wrong with the main board, it's causing the LED on the monitor chassis to come on and stay on which is obviously shutting the monitor down at the same time. The board produces nothing at all on the screen, no pic. no spot killer, nothing but a black screen.

this is being tested in my working tempest which is all running perfect until i plug his board in. His AR2 is working fine, it's all main board related.
 
I'd offer to look at it, but I have no spare time in the near future, and my success rate at fixing Tempest boards is only about 50/50.

Alan

This is why I didn't offer as well, no spare time to do it and get it back to you in a reasonable amount of turnaround time.

I would go with Talon as well, he has a good setup with that PAT9000 and can probably turn it around quicker. I haven't seen any boards from Eldarado that really seemed fixed.

Luke
 
Does anything happen in self test mode? Flip the self-test switch, then power up the game (or press the reset button the AVG board). See if anything displays on the screen or if it beeps out any RAM failure tones. (see page 8 in the Tempest manual or page 1A of the schematics)

Chris, have you tried interswapping Phet's boards with yours to see if you can narrow the problem down to just his AUX or AVG board? Have the header pins for his interboard cable been resoldered? If you check at the X and Y test points on the AVG board, what sort of voltages do you see?

It sounds like the game is not playing blind, is that true? If it plays blind, then the failure is likely in the x or y output circuitry. If it's not playing at all, then the problem is somewhere deeper.

I'd offer to look at it, but I have no spare time in the near future, and my success rate at fixing Tempest boards is only about 50/50.

Alan


His board does nothing at all even in test mode and unfortunately for Phet i'm not gonna start swapping boards cuz when this is all over i don't wanna end up with two non working boards.
 
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If it's not playing blind, it could be a bad ROM. Check pin 40 of the 6502/8... if it's pulsing between 0v and 5v the watch dog is active. If that's the case, I'd just start checking ROMs... especially if they are the original masked ROMs.

Just fixed a board last night that had a bad ROM and a bad 6502.
 
His board does nothing at all even in test mode and unfortunately for Phet i'm not gonna start swapping boards cuz when this is all over i don't wanna end up with two non working boards.

Chris... I have an "extra" Tempest set. It has problems of it's own, in the mathbox area I believe... but I don't mind if you use it to troubleshoot. It may at least give you guys some idea what's actually NOT working with Shawn's set.

I am having continuing challenges with my 6100 so it doesn't make sense for me to try it. At least you have a known good cabinet/monitor.

http://s972.photobucket.com/albums/ae206/alejandro_madera/Arcade/Mathbox/

Ignore the half deflection... that's my 6100 issue. Does that with both PCB sets.

Wanna try?
 
I went with a swap from Komodo, and my Tempest is up and running again. What's weird is that this board seems to be a different revision than mine. The levels are different and harder, and the attract mode "TEMPEST" seems to step up from small to large in 3-4 stages, where my original was like more of a continuous animation where the word grew before your eyes. Thanks Pat, my board will be on the way back to you this week.
 
I went with a swap from Komodo, and my Tempest is up and running again. What's weird is that this board seems to be a different revision than mine. The levels are different and harder, and the attract mode "TEMPEST" seems to step up from small to large in 3-4 stages, where my original was like more of a continuous animation where the word grew before your eyes. Thanks Pat, my board will be on the way back to you this week.
I remember seeing video of a Tempest machine doing that logo step up thing you described. Always thought it was kinda neat and wondered why mine didn't do that.
 
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