RE: Galaga - problems setting Rank D

Wow! Nice work, Rodney! I don't know if Namco ever did go out of their way
to tell anyone about this, but I can testify that I've never seen this other
tip in any manual anywhere: If the FREEZE VIDEO switch is on when you power
up the game, it will continuously cycle through the boot-up sequence without
ever actually starting the game. (You know those screens full of running
garbage and the explosion sound? It will do that over and over and over...)
I spent a hell of a lot of time trying to "fix" a "bad" boardset with this
"problem"!

Matt

  -----Original Message-----
  From: owner-rasterlist@vectorlist.org
[mailto:owner-rasterlist@vectorlist.org]On Behalf Of Rodney Minch
  Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2010 9:38 PM
  To: rasterlist@vectorlist.org
  Subject: Re: RASTER: Galaga - problems setting Rank D

  Matt - you nailed it. I was just getting ready to send out an email with
what I discovered tonight when I saw your post. I put the game back in test
mode and started moving the dip switches one by one to see what changes it
made, which is when I discovered that on this boardset SW1 and SW2 control
the difficulty. Once I put SW1 on and SW2 off the game was showing Rank D.

  Did Namco release a service bulletin or anything like that to let people
know that the dip switch settings on some boards are different? I couldn't
find any information that talked about this. The multiple sources where I
looked up the dip switch settings for Galaga were all the same as the
manual, which states SW2 & SW3 control the difficulty/rank.

  Rodney

  On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 11:15 PM, Matt J. McCullar <mccullar@flash.net>
wrote:

    Rodney, I don't have my _Galaga_ notes handy right now, but I think
there may be the slight possibility that some _Galaga_ boardsets had
slightly different DIP switch settings for difficulty levels. I think I had
a similar problem a while back but I can't remember for sure. If the
boardset you have is at least working properly, put it into self-test and
see if other DIP switches might have some effect.

    Matt J. McCullar
    Fort Worth, TX

      -----Original Message-----
      From: owner-rasterlist@vectorlist.org
[mailto:owner-rasterlist@vectorlist.org]On Behalf Of Rodney Minch
      Sent: Wednesday, November 03, 2010 11:34 AM
      To: rasterlist@vectorlist.org
      Subject: RASTER: Galaga - problems setting Rank D

      I've got an original Galaga board that I've set the dip switches to
Rank D (Dip Switch 6J, SW2=On, SW3=Off) but the game shows it's set to Rank
C. I can only get the game to show Rank A or Rank C. Basically SW2 is always
stuck at Off no matter if the dip switch is set to on or off. I've used my
DMM to verify SW2 is working properly. I also verified the trace going from
SW2 to pin 3 of the 74LS151 at 4K is good per the schematics.

      All the other dip switches at 6J are working fine along with all the
dip switches at 6K. Any ideas what could be going on here? Could the 74LS151
at 4K be bad?

      The weird thing is another person local to me had a Galaga board that
was doing the exact same thing as this one. Not sure if this is a common
problem or what.

      Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

      Rodney

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Received on Thu Nov 4 23:52:56 2010