Re: Fragile games?

My past (and present) experience operating Battlezone supports
your impression. I have found that the factory-original setup
has several weak-link items that repeatedly fail and need
babysitting.

Mostly, they are connection issues: edgeboard connectors, the
inter-board connector and pins, EPROM and PROM sockets. The 2114
RAMs also do not seem to be very hardy.

After:

1. re-soldering all connector pins,
2. cleaning and re-tensioning the edgeboard connector fingers,
3. installing new sockets on the EPROMs, bit-slice processors,
and microcode PROMs,
4. Socketing all RAMs, and
5. wiring a brand new interboard connector,

my BZ is reliable...mostly. It still needs the interboard
connector wiggled or re-seated every other week or so. Time to
go over that part again...sigh.

I can understand why it's less reliable than, say, Asteroids:
there's just more stuff to go wrong. But, worse than Star Wars?
Is it because BZ is the first game on that hardware?

On Thursday, September 12, 2002, at 07:14 PM, Joel Rosenzweig wrote:

> Maybe it's just me, but it seems that if I look at my
> Battlezone boardset
> the wrong way, it breaks. I don't seem to have nearly as many
> problems with
> any other game I own. Do others find any particular board set
> more fragile
> than others?
>
> Did a get well kit for Asteroids and Battlezone ever get
> produced, i.e. one
> that replaced all the eproms with a single device, and one that
> replaced all
> the rams with a single device? I've got several boardsets of
> each that
> are in various malfunctioning states, and I'm gearing myself up for
> repairing each of them. It occured to me that this would be a
> fine time to
> consider the use of such a get well kit, if it exists!
>
> Thanks,
> Joel-
>
>
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--
Anthony Ramos -- aramos@ele-mental.org / aramos@hyperreal.org
phone: 503.236.6303 / mobile: 503.267.3519
600 Southeast 39th Avenue #3, Portland, Oregon 97214 USA
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