RE: Battlezone (repair rant!)

On Wed, 4 Oct 2000, Rosenzweig, Joel B wrote:
> >
> > Anyway, just had to rant a little there. Another day in the life of
> > collecting 20 year old electronics...
>
> That was good. Though I was looking for:
>
> 2A) Power up game again in test mode. Beep BEEP.
> [ ... ]
> again. Beep BEEP! "No no no, this can't be possible. I just
> replaced that chip!

ROFL. You just described my experience a few years ago resurrecting
a Lunar Lander board. Thankfully, I was using sockets for every RAM
I replaced, and it took me about four or five RAM chips before I got
a set of 2114s that "liked" the boardset.

The problem was probably a slightly-dodgy buffer chip, but as all my
RAM is pulled (or desoldered, actually) from boards I picked up at
surplus stores, I blamed the RAM before I blamed the buffer chips.

As for Red Baron, I had to use a signature analyzer to find the TTL
chip that had failed. It was just a random piece of glue logic that
quit, and would have been impossible to find without the signature
analysis guide. Kudos to Atari for putting the signatures on that
schematic.

ObVids:

While I'm typing - CA Extreme was awesome. Getting up to the top
of the final wave on Marble Man was *hard*, but worth the effort.

I believe the secret was to line oneself up on the "diagonals" of
the grid (i.e. being able to move "straight up" on the screen), thereby
having sqrt(4+4)=2.82 squares worth of space in which to accelerate with
the Turbo button and hop over the 2.82 squares of ice, rather than trying
to accelerate over 2 squares worth fo space and slide up 2 squares of ice.

OK, that's more properly the rasterlist, but hey, there was lots of
awesome vector stuff at CA extreme too. Very nice to see Alpha One
beside a Major Havoc!

Later,
Doug.

-- 
 dougj   |
   @     |
hwcn.org |
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