Today's Pickup

YellowDog

In Memoriam

Donor 2011, 2013
Joined
Apr 12, 2008
Messages
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Location
Humble, Texas
I saw this in Wednesday's CL and I was sure it was gone by the time I emailed, but, nothing ventured, nothing gained. So I sent an email asking if the Tempest was still available and asking if he would mind holding it until I could pick it up on Friday. When I hadn't heard anything after a few hours, I figured I had been blown off. Thursday morning I got a reply that he was good with holding it until Friday. :eek:.

So this afternoon, with the help of KatanaJoe and his trusty Subaru pickup truck we headed out and returned with one of the few non-Williams games on my bucket list:

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The Tempest (not the Galaga). As a side benefit, it has a very low serial number: 1457

The cabinet has a few dings and the monitor could use some work, but I now have a Tempest to call my own. :D

ken
 

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Nice looking Tempest. I have a friend that comes over we drink wine and play Tempest, we play for high scores. As soon as we been the other guy we quit as not to set the bar too high lol. I just beat his high score the other day i think i am at 150,000 or around there now., lots of fun hope you enjoy yours.
 
Ken,

Congrats on a great catch. It looks like it is in great condition.

Tempest is the 2nd arcade game that I've owned - 1st is a Star Trek Cockpit.

Tempest is a very replayable game, it never seems to get old (just more difficult!)

Christmas came early at Ken's house this year!
 
Thanks everybody.

It is in playable condition. It looks like I am going to have to do some homework to clean up the monitor a little. It is losing white (looks pink on screen) and the lines near the edges have a definite curve to them.

The cabinet is pretty solid (and heavy). I am going to have to measure it. It could be an optical illusion, but it seems wider than the average cabinet. If so it may end up staying downstairs. There are also a few dings I may try to clean up. The upper right corner has been bashed and is basically only being held in by the side art.

Later today or tomorrow I will put new locks on it so it is keyed the same as my other games. I'll also pull the back door and perform the ritual reseating of all the connectors and pushing down of the socketted chips that is required of Atari vector games.

I do have it hooked up to one of the remote sockets because of the location of the power switch (lower right hand corner in the back). Gaaaa! I always hated that on my Battlezone (until I did the rotate the interlock switch trick). But these remote sockets make it easy to just hang the power swtch on the keyring.

I haven't started my literature search yet, but does anybody know where the Tubes ROM goes? I bought one off Ebay a while ago when somebody was blowing them out cheap (hoping I would someday own a Tempest).

I am also going to go looking for the schematics and operators manuals.

ken

Edit: never mind about the Tubes mod. The location (1K) is right on the chip. Doh! :(
 
I'm interested to hear what you think of Tubes vs. original Tempest. I keep going back and forth - nice to have some variety!
 
Well I reseated all the connectors and now I have white back. There are still a couple of things I am not sure about. First on the Tempest logo there are a couple of extraneous lines. I'm not familiar enough to know if these are normal. The second is the lines seem to curve when they are near the edge of the screen.

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It is hard to get decent pictures, especially when the images are moving, but I think you can see what I was asking about from these.

ken
 

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The extra lines on the logo will go away if you turn the brightness down slightly. On mine that leaves everything else slightly less bright than I like so I still let it show those a little but it doesn't bother me. Perhaps someone can share a way to adjust that all the way out while still keeping the overall brightness. I think every Tempest I've owned had that though.

As for the curving lines, do you live anywhere near a black hole by chance?
 
The extra lines on the logo will go away if you turn the brightness down slightly. On mine that leaves everything else slightly less bright than I like so I still let it show those a little but it doesn't bother me. Perhaps someone can share a way to adjust that all the way out while still keeping the overall brightness. I think every Tempest I've owned had that though.?

I can probably turn the brightness down. The guy I bought it from had it in his garage so it was probably turned up so it could be played during the day. Also, part of it is taking pictures. It is not as noticible in person. The camera probably exaggerated it because the logo isn't really that BRIGHT in real life.


As for the curving lines, do you live anywhere near a black hole by chance?

Now, now. There is no reason to talk about my neighbors that way.....:rolleyes:

ken
 
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