Re: Fixing Asteroids explosions

From: Grant Thienemann <grant.thienemann_at_gmail.com>
Date: Mon Feb 04 2013 - 07:28:58 EST

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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>>>
>>> André Huijts
>>> andre.huijts@upcmail.nl
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
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>>
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>
> André Huijts
> andre.huijts@upcmail.nl
>
>
>
>
>
>
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Received on Mon Feb 4 07:29:32 2013

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