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

A buddy of mine asked me to test some Asteroids boards
in my Asteroids Deluxe (cabaret) cabinet and I noticed
some strange things and thought I'd run it past RGVAC
to see if this is normal or something is, in fact,
wrong with these Asteroids boards.

The first Asteroids board plays and sounds great, except
after most of the asteroids are destroyed there is an
area in the middle of the screen (where the ship starts
and just above it, maybe 2 inches wide) that just seems
to disappear and then reappear a second or two latter.
I played several games and this repeated (it was easy to
do with only one small asteroid left and I would spin the
ship).

The second Asteroids board had some tiny and sometimes
echoed "normal sounds", like the system would start the
sound, stop and then continue it. The "dun, dun, dun"
was normal (sounding and volume level). That sounds like
a board problem to me, but weirdly enough it did the same
video goofiness as the above board did. However, it did
it more often and with more asteroids on the screen.

My Asteroids Deluxe (cabaret) cabinet is known, good
tested and has worked fine for 3 years now. I put the
AD board back in and never had any of the display issues
mentioned above. Is this a problem with the boards or
something the monitor doesn't like about the signal the
boards are putting out??? I'd like to get one of Clay's
Asteroids/Asteroids Deluxe/Lunar Lander kits, once
completed, and will need to run a Asteroids board in this
cabinet. Obviously, I'd like to know what is going on.

Just for the record, the AR1 was rebuilt several years
ago and has worked fine since then, so I believe voltages
are fine. I noticed that typical resistor is burnt again,
but I know what causes that and verified the harness is
fine now.

Any ideas?

Scott C.


I haven't tracked it down for sure yet. I've had this been going on for
years.

I know for sure i've got a deflection board that gives this behaviour
regardless of the board you put in it, so i swapped out the deflection
board. Game was then perfect with the bootleg board i put in there for
18 months or more.

Then i start to work on the Asteroids boards that have been on the
shelf forever and find a couple of the Asteroids boards make this
supposedly good deflection board do it too!

I have observed (back when i was trying to diagnose it) that when stuff
in the middle of the screen would start to dissapear was always at the
end of the level when there is very little left happening on the screen
(1 tiny asteroid left, maybe none), that you could pretty much always
make things come back on by firing (thus giving the beam something
extra to draw) and that when the stuff dissapears, the spot killer
starts to kick in.

SO, my guess is that on some of these boards the Z output is too weak?
(Or is it the other way round? - too strong), and so they exhibit the
problem more easily, and that with my original deflection board there
was something in the spot killer circuit that would make it show up
even easier or more consistently, however you want to put it...

Sorry, but as yet I've taken no further action with trying to resolve
this. Like yourself, my own personal board and monitor combination
works perfectly, so it hasn't been high priority to get to the bottom
of for me.

Maybe some usefulness in my reply though? :)

Martin.