Tempest Multigame (found it!)

Of course this mysterious "problem" with the Tempest Multigame hs been
driving me nuts all morning, so I went home during lunch to experiment.

I starting plugging in Tempest boards off my "dead" pile hoping to get one
sorta working to experiment with that I hadn't already messed with during
development of the multigame. I lucked out and had one with the Z-blanking
messed up, but otherwise functional.

I plugged in a Tempest Multigame and turned it on. No problems. Patting
myself on the back for showing "yet another" working boardset I selected
Vortex from the menu... Bzzzzzt. Reset. Huh? Try Aliens... Bzzzzzzzt.
Reset. GRRRRRRR. Exactly what Doug is seeing!

I then proceeded to try to peel the paint off the cabinet by rattling off
the longest string of obscenities and epithets I could think of. (No luck.)

A did a 1:1 comparison of the "good" and "problem" boards which revealed
that they're IDENTICAL revs and seem to have no distinguishing differences.
Grrrrr.

After some head-scratching I remembered Doug's e-mail telling me what his
dip-switches are set to... I figured "what the hell" and set the "problem"
board's DIP switches to the same as the working one and...

It now works fine! So, I don't know *which* switch is pissing off
Vortex/Aliens, but the following seems to make them happy:

(1 = "ON", 0= "OFF")

N13: 10011111
L12: 11110111
K10/11: 0000

These are all on the Tempest CPU board. I'll narrow it down tonight, but
for now you can use these settings and it should be happy.

*whew* ;-)

-Clay
Received on Wed Jun 30 15:24:20 1999