Re: Star Castle problems ...

On Wed, 01 Oct 1997 15:15:12 -0500, you wrote:

>Alright Zonn and crew -
>
>So I finally replace the power transistors in my monitor in
>my Star Castle, and fire the game up. The led is flickering
>rapidly - damn. For I press on all the ribbon cables, to
>make sure that they are on well, and when I press the one
>leading to the control panel, the light stops flickering!!!
>I go and look at the monitor, and all I have is one ring of
>vectors, with the ends crossing each other, in the middle of
>the screen about 3 times to big! (what a run-on sentence)

When the LED quits flickering and the monitor is displaying something,
your machine at that point, maybe working fine.

Have you played with the pots on the monitor? If they were max'ed you
could have them set so that the X and Y sizes are stretched way beyond the
edge of the screen.

The other two pots control the length of the lines, they are used to set
the end points so they don't cross.

Make sure the cable going from the monitor to the CPU board is good, if you
have a loose connection here, stranges things can happen to the display.

If the picture is also blurring and/or dim and/or unstable in size, you
might have a high voltage problem. Low high-voltage will cause the display
to *bloom*.

>What is my best way to attack this problem? I have no other
>Cine games and I was using a switcher for my +5.

I'd start by checking to see what's loose or shorting that's causing the
CPU's reset LED to flicker -- do this without the monitor plugged in. Then
I'd attack the monitor.

Check to see that the game runs the demo fine without the control panel
plugged in, if this is the case, look for short/bad connections in the
control panel/wiring harness.

Do the obvious things check and reseat the ROMs and ALUs and anything else
socketed. It maybe the LED flicker has nothing to do with the control
panel connector, it maybe a bad socket that's affected when that area of
the board is pressed.

-Zonn
Received on Wed Oct 1 16:48:12 1997