Battlezone

Hi guys,

My Battlezone is giving me a mathbox low byte error. I pulled out the aux
board and reseated all the socketed chips, and shuffled those ALU's around
to see if the error would shift to the high byte. It didn't. After putting
the machine back together, the game actually worked for about 30 seconds,
(no mathbox errors this time) then the mathbox failed again, with another
low byte error. For a few moments, it shifted between a low and a high byte
error, then settled back on low.

I haven't yet broken out the signature analyzer to see specifically which
chip might be misbehaving. I'm not convinced that it's really an IC problem
at all, more that there is a mechanical connection issue with one or more of
the sockets. For those of you who've had mathbox problems like mine, was it
actually one of the ALU's, or was it mechanical in nature? (or some other
chip?) I'll reflow the MTA connector pins again, (it's been 2 years since
the last time), but maybe these sockets are to blame?

The best part of all of this was when my "Trusty, I laugh at all the
reliability problems with my color vector brothers, I'm so robust I should
still be produced" monitor started blooming and warping the top and left of
the display. I thought it was the mathbox doing weird things at first, but
I happen to have had my scope on the game simultaneously, and that display
was perfect (until the mathbox really did freak out, of course.)

Now back to reading that monitor FAQ... :-)

Thanks for any input.
Joel-
Received on Wed Dec 29 13:07:22 1999