John's Arcade Forum - Classic Arcade and Pinball Collecting and Restoring Discussion Forum - RETRO MAME - Nintendo Vs Forum

Ok so I picked up an Asteroids Deluxe and its driving me bonkers. I have done a bunch of work to it including rebuild AR board, new big blue, PCB cap kit even changed transistors and voltage regulators in x y section. All I have is a slightly moving dot on screen that moves when I adjust x and y gain. Spot killer is on and the game is not playing blind. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

so you cant get the game to play blind at all? No audio, nothing?

Sounds like you have a dead board. Vector games are kind of a pain to work on. not much I can tell you.

Reset all the eproms, check for broken legs on chips.
Check for power at the chips.

Nope nothing. I reset all the eproms and I did find one chip that looks like it may have been repaired. I am getting power at chips as well.

When testing the chips is there a particular leg that is best for testing voltage on the EPROM chips?

When I got my AD it was similar to yours. My issue was the AR board as well but I found it really needed the correct voltages. I know you've rebuilt it but do make sure all your voltages are set. I think there's also some troubleshooting that can be done depending on what your player lights are doing. Also listen for beeps on start up as well if you haven't already done so. I'm no pro with this stuff, that's about all I got. 

what are the P1 and P2 start buttons doing?

Check the signal coming up the harness to the monitor itself.  you can check it at the molex.
also , is the light on the board on?

The p1 and p2 lights are solid not blinking. I used the Asteroids encyclopedia on ion pool.net and replaced the lm305 like it suggested.

All of my voltages from my AR board are perfect. The voltages for the monitor 60 and 6.1 are good at the molex for the monitor. I am getting very low voltages for the x, y, and z.

It does not beep at all either.

is the LED on, on the game board? Voltages at chips? Put the game in freeplay on the dips, it should blink the p1 and p2 cone buttons. You need to get there before you worry about the monitor or video.

The LED on the game board is lit. It won't coin up and the p1 and p2 are on continuously. I will check the dip settings and change it to free play and report back.

Things to try. Pull each socketed chip, check the legs for damage, possibly clean the legs with steel wool, GENTLY. The atari custom chips in their games almost always get this black nasty corrosion on them and are very brittle. I've had quite a number of previously working boards come in with broken legs that looked fine in the socket but you pull the chip and one of the legs come off.  Its possible the ram is bad and keeping it from booting up. If you check everything else and it still isn't working well i'll get my schematics out and try to find places of attack.

Thanks for the help I really appreciate it. I actually did this last weekend. I pulled, cleaned and re-socketed all the chips on the board. Put everything back together and nothing has changed. I did however notice that the 74LS161 chip in location D6 looks like it has been repaired. One of the legs looks like it has a copper piece around it. Do you think that could be the problem? I will put in an order for one and replace it anyway just to be safe.

yes a bad 161 can make it non-functional. I would have to see what you are saying about repaired to determine if that is likely the cause or not. just be careful when you desolder it, also its in your best interest to replace it with a socket .

http://www.ebay.com/itm/ATARI-ASTEROIDS-DELUXE-ARCADE-MACHINE-PCB-BOARD/231415730735?_trksid=p2047675.c100005.m1851&_trkparms=aid%3D222007%26algo%3DSIC.MBE%26ao%3D1%26asc%3D27538%26meid%3Db51ef3a5b5a048488bfa12e2998f11db%26pid%3D100005%26prg%3D11353%26rk%3D3%26rkt%3D6%26sd%3D231415740401&rt=nc

Untested but may work, who knows.

Ok so I replaced the LS161 and  the q1 q2 and q3 transistors. No change. I was able to borrow a working board from a friend and popped it in the cab. Game worked but with no sound. At least I know the monitor works and it's definitely a board issue. Well back to the drawing board for me.

Without a logic probe/analyzer you really dont have a lot of hope to fix this. If you know anyone with those tools. take it to them and give it a shot. I don't want to discorage you but you need to figure out if the cpu is even running or resetting or whatever.

Well I got a new board. Guy on KLOV does a swap. Works great. Got it cleaned up. The sound was still out so I inspected the AR board   I replaced the audio amps and found a bad trace from one of the bigger caps. Jumpered that and sound came right up. Looks and sounds great. (http://tapatalk.imageshack.com/v2/15/01/03/809ff21507799d4e805b6874fae4d52c.jpg)