Re: Fixing Asteroids explosions

I have had mine on the original settings (hard, two ships) for a few months. It is hard, but you get better. According to the Atari bulletin about the ROM update, it's only easy for the first 30,000 points anyway.

I haven't played it on easy in a while, but I hope I'll be rocking it when I do.

On Feb 4, 2013, at 4:28 AM, Grant Thienemann <grant.thienemann@gmail.com> wrote:

> Remembering there are two versions of Asteroids Deluxe, the early
> version that was insanely hard and what people have dubbed the
> "European" version which has a dip switch to select between the two,
> and its normal and hard. I made myself a set of the European roms and
> love the game now, the hard version is just insane.
>
> On Sun, Feb 3, 2013 at 3:36 PM, Andre Huijts <a.huijts@upcmail.nl> wrote:
>> I never play that much AD as I find it too hard (depends on settings though I guess) but indeed I never noticed it happening on AD.....
>>
>>
>> Op 3 feb. 2013, om 21:01 heeft Altan Stalker <pinball@aaarfamily.com> het volgende geschreven:
>>
>>> Just Asteroids or Deluxe also? I have not noticed it on Deluxe.
>>>
>>> On Feb 3, 2013, at 2:59 PM, Andre Huijts <a.huijts@upcmail.nl> wrote:
>>>
>>>> FYI:
>>>>
>>>> I've noticed this on my Asterock (Italian Asteroids bootleg) too and always wondered it it was a defect because I too saw it on most Asteroids cabs.
>>>>
>>>> Maybe worthwhile to have a look the Asterock schematics too....
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Op 3 feb. 2013, om 19:47 heeft Ian Eure <ieure@mac.com> het volgende geschreven:
>>>>
>>>>> Pretty much every Asteroids I've ever played has had an intermittent issue where explosions sometimes display as a flat, inconsistently dashed line instead of the animated dots. They can be either horizontal or vertical, it can happen one in five or ten or fifteen explosions. Everything else works fine. I have heard that this is caused by bad LS161 counters.
>>>>>
>>>>> I'm wondering if this is usually the case, and if so, whether there are any good techniques to isolate the faulty ICs. There are a ton of these on the PCB and I don't want to socket everything to track down a single faulty IC. I don't have an IC tester, scope, or any advanced diagnostic tools, just a logic probe. The problem is so intermittent and only occurs during gameplay, so it seems like the probe isn't going to be much help in this case.
>>>>>
>>>>> I read on the (sadly now defunct) usbdesigntech.com site that the following 161s were very prone to failure:
>>>>>
>>>>> Type SA 74LS161 with a date code of 8108
>>>>> Type SA 74LS161 with a date code of 8045
>>>>> Type SA 74LS161 with a date code of 8046
>>>>>
>>>>> I could start by swapping any of those I find, but I was curious to know if there is a better way to do this.
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>>>>
>>>> Andr?? Huijts
>>>> andre.huijts@upcmail.nl
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>
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>>
>> Andr?? Huijts
>> andre.huijts@upcmail.nl
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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Received on Mon Feb 4 14:15:00 2013