I'm JUST in safely back !
First of all, it was f-ing
HOT The weather Gods were laughing there asses off I bet because instead of loads of snow they now gave us loads of HEAT !
Anyway, I'm very glad that it was so succeful. Esp. getting the Berzerk back in working shape was important to me. Luckely it was quite easy. The strange thing is that although we only had three beeps, it wasn't the BSC board that was failing but the VFB. And incindently, the game actually showed the bad RAM when it was booted ! Silly from me not asking if it indicated anything on the screen before but I admit that I also didn't have much faith in those indications before.
Another lesson learned !
Although we got 8 beeps and could play the game, very soon the Voice board started acting up (Ully already mentioned it had done before). It was all like a funny sounding garbage being produced. Funny, but not what you want it to be. So we exchanged the voice board with a spare and it worked great again. I will look into it later here what the problem on the voice board is.
Then I just _had_ to improve the picture on the screen, took a bit of regulating to get a fine picture.
The WoW was pretty easy too. Although there was no neck-glow (which often is an indiction of no HV) I could hear the HV crackling up on the first power up.
So I expected the HV to be there, I checked with my HV probe and indeed 20 kV.
So, why was the heater not glowing ? There were some tracks that we knew had been cracked and one of them was the trace for the heater. I pretty soon found out with the multi-meter that the previous repair didn't work, so I soldered in a bridge using one leg of a resistor. Fired up and YES we have WoW !!
Of course we had to play a couple of 2 player games and what a lovely game this is ! First time ever that I played it on an original machine !!! (I already loved the Atari 8-bit version). But, there was no marquee light ! There was a 230V ballast in there, but it was still wired orignally (to the 110V) so we traced the wires and by moving one wire to the 230V tab of the transformer we got it to light up nicely.
Those were the main jobs for me, the Defender battery mod was a no-brainer. This morning we also investigated a problem on the Missile Command, turns out there is one bad opto-board in there..
Anyway, there was no magic at all, just some basic trouble shooting and I was glad that this was enough to get those brilliant games back up and running again.
Ully, if you EVER want to sell that WoW, think of me
We also had some time to watch some videos and of course the "losers" finale
Congrats on Germany, now, I'm getting ready to witness the match of the century !!!!
