Re: New Irobot owner

If your power supplies are all okay, then there are multiple problems that could
be happening with the boardset. First, see if the watchdog is barking, if so,
then check the main CPU and associated chips (verify all ROM's and other
socketed chips first). The big bank of video RAM on the video board was known to
have big failure problems. Im not sure if that would keep the board from booting
however. Unfortunately, Atari didn't socket any of these Mostek RAM's, you will
have to pull them all manually and this time, maybe add sockets. The Actual RAM
(4164's I think) are a dime a dozen on many old 80286 motherboards.

Also, the self test errors that the game displays are wrong in certin
circumstances. I would do a deja search in RGVAC for more info on this as I
can't remember which two messages are swapped.

I don't think that the power supplies are all that bad if yours is initially
working. I think the big problem with them was that it was in the early years of
a switching power supply (if not the first) contained in an arcade game. Most
techs never got down into the theory of fixing them since later they were so
cheap that you just threw away the old one and put in another peter chou.
Im sure that the power supply has some weaknesses in it's age but given that you
do an inital re-cap, everything should be fine.

I wish I had an I,Robot too. :-( I only have the hall effect joystick, so far!
:-0

jess

Steven Zeuner wrote:
>
> Hi folks, I Robot #296 owner here. :)
>
> The game is all original and has the large switching supply inside. There
> is also a modern switching supply hacked into the old switching supply. I
> like my machines as original as possible.
>
> I've heard the older switching supply is junk and unrepairable, any truth to
> this?
>
> Is there a FAQ available to help me find out the cause of the machine not
> coming up?
>
> Thanks,
> Steve
>
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Received on Mon Apr 24 08:41:45 2000