Games in space, with rocks and saucers......Atari Italy Asteroids

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Oh and they made one small design mistake.....the LED that indicated that thenpt killer is active is placed right behind a connector, making it invisible (or very hard to see) from the back of the monitor...but this is just a very minor thing of course

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OK let's talk about sound.

Sound is probably the most underrated part of video gaming.

Try playing a game without it....it will not be the same experience.

Some of you guys may know I'm a bit of an audiophile, I love great audio equipment and listen to vinyl a lot.

So....when I first heard the Italian Asteroids sounds it felt ......wrong. I couldn't really describe it but it was just not THAT sound and feel that the I remember from the original US/Irish cabs.

So I experimented with speakers and the cover and soon found out that I really prefered the original US sized speaker (which I luckily had around.
Also, the cover is one of the worst speaker covers I've ever seen. It BARELY passes through air....and guess what is needed for sound reproduction

So this needed to be fixed....I want to FEEL that basic Asteroids sound

However, I also wanted to keep the look as original as possible. Some compromise would have to be made of course but...not too much.

So, let's first get rid of that terrible piece of plastic that stops the thing from sounding right: I started with cutting each "connection" with a hand cutter but soon decided to use my Dremel bootleg instead. This gave a nice smell which reminds you that we need to save our oil supplies if we want to keep making plastic stuff.....

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Of course, it's understandable that in an arcade environment they needed to protect the speaker from molest and went for a sturdy cover like this, but now it will stay in my home, it's not needed anymore.

I could have just left that hole open of course, perfect for the sound (in fact, that's how my main speakers in my living room are...) but it would not look very nice...

So let's cover it with some good speaker cloth....I still had a broken cover from my first quality speakers ever around...let's give it some good new use

I simply pulled it over the supports, stretching it so it was nice and tight and glued the cloth to the bezel.

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That turned out better than I'd expected

One more thing I had to do was shorten the 4 supports of the bezel which normally also hold the speaker because else they would touch the bigger speaker I was going to use.

I simply reinstalled the nuts(under the area to cut) and used a hand saw. Installing the nuts makes it possible to screw them off again which "restores" the tread (makes it easier to turn the nuts back on again).

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Somehow, whichever way I take a pic of this it makes the cloth look much more grey than when you see it in real live...o well....trust me, it does look better (more black) in real life

Mounted the new speaker with 4 small screws, used crimp connectors instead of solder and we're ready to test

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But first......I had to reinstall some rubber "foam" tape again. This always rots away on the marquee holders and makes the marquee vibrate with the sound, I totally hate that ! So I used some nice 3M on the insides of the bezels. I had also installed this on the control panel where it "touches" the plastic bezel, to prevent scratches...

No pics of this though...

It's funny to hear the difference without and with the marquee installed. Without there is hardly any bass....it's speaker-building basics, you need a closed box

Anyway, the result is AWESOME !!!! I really cranked up the volume pot and the sound is clear (bullets) and deep (thumb-thumb sound and thrust) with NO resonation anywhere.....love it

I further worked on the monitor. I received the missing caps and replaced them. I also checked the voltages according to the manual. Turned out the voltage on T3 which is supposed to be 30V according to the manual was about 20V ! I guess this was partially because of the change on the transformer I did.
So i turned this back up to 30V again and the picture shrank because of that (this is normal, a low HV gives a bigger screen.). So had to re-adjust the sizes.

Also not 100% happy with the linearity so I started fiddling with that but that's something that takes a bit of time I guess and maybe I need to replace the pots.....

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Oh by the way, I made a pic of the HVT for the part number. The brand seems to be ARCO as this is stamped on the metal part on top.

The number is 28 407600010

Regretfully....Google has nothing on it...

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OK let's finish this machine !!

Did a lot of stuff, may forget somethings but anyway:

Although the monitor looked nice, I noticed there was some pretty big difference in size of the Asteroids when they were in mainly the top area of the screen (they "grew").

So I had to fiddle that out...to really adjust a monitor nicely you need to be able to look at it AND reach the pots. Impossible when inside the cab. Normally you'd use a screen generator but I don't have a vector one yet...now....again the Hantarex MTRV wins big points here, because it's pretty easy to set it up like this...I did have to cut some ty-raps away to get the harness out of the cab a bit further...

Did I already mention I had to set up the +30V again, it was around 20V and following that the screen was "oversized". I re-adjusted that properly, this also takes care of the correct HV.

Soon enough I discovered that one of the pots that adjust the linearity was dead. So I replaced it with one I had around. I feel much for replacing them all one day....these are much better protected agains dust and are 10 times easier to adjust but ...OK for now. (New pot in the center of the pic, an old tupe is visible a the right side.

This really helped getting a much better linearity.

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While moving around chassis and frame a bit I suddenly had lost the complete picture.....yikes....

But I felt it had to do something with a wire having been strained a bit, and I noticed there was no neck glow anymore.

It turned out the 4 wire plug on the HV board had some loose solderings. Renewed them and fixed.....phew....

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I had already checked all the caps on the AR-I board but hadn't cleaned it yet, so I did. While I had it out I noticed the connector solderings were looking very dull so I renewed those as well.

With all this chassis removing....this happened....one of the plastic screw-wheels broke. Now....it's just a regular screw inside....I tried glueing it but it didn't work out well so I decided to live with it, if things are as I thing they are the chassis isn't coming out for a long time

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I had noticed that when the cardboard was inside, there would be light "edges" showing on both sides of the plexi bezel, not a pretty sight.

So I decided to make those far edges black. First I started with a permanent marker but it figured this was too clumsy and not so nice looking so I decided to use isolation tape instead...

Hmmm, remarkable......Rev. C artwork....wow....makes you wonde what they revised.

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OK, put back in the monitor and re-ty-rapped the harness there.

The harness has one pretty weird thing for the monitor: the left most connector has two more pins than there are on the monitor and you have to connect it "in the middle"....it's very easy to shift it one pin because there are no blocking pins or so inside the connector....tricky !

Of course I cut away the excess of the ty-raps. The Italian builders used staples that were drive in with low pressure so that they stand out of the wood so it's easy to get a ty-rap in there....pretty smart.

Now....I had replaced the edge connector already, but I used a JAMMA one witch I had cut to the correct length/number of pins. However, I didn't want it to be possible to move up/down (transport !!!) and move contacts to the wrong spot !
So I had to think up a way to block off the cut part.
(I used a JAMMA connector because I have quite a few of them, and not so many 22 pins ones).

I noticed the cut-off part's edge might fit into the open part and.....hah, a perfect fit !

So I sawed this part off and glued it in that part of the connector, and this worked out great. (Pic is trying if it would fit, not the finished situation).

I also did some careful sanding of the CP to get rid of the cigarette burns as much as possible. I used very fine (1500) sand paper. I got most of it gone, but it started to hurt the paint so I stopped. This is like it will stay, it's OK. During the sanding it really smelt like this filthy stench of cigarettes....yugh.

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So....let's do the coin door.

I LOVEEEEEEEE the Euro silvery coin doors because.....they NEVER need paint....nor do they rust....this saves having them sand-blasted and having to spray paint them !!!!

Yeah there are some scratches and scuffs on this one, but all I did was polish it a bit with a magic sponge and it looks very nice and shining again.

I had to sand out the hole of the door and the holder of the coin counter to be able to fit in the lock (had to force it in a bit still) but it worked fine.

Both coin insert lights were dead....and it showed, nice silver on the inside of the glass !
They show they are 7V lights but I only have type 47 here (6.3V). I guess it will be OK...
It's funny to see this type used, these are more "Euro" I guess....

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Last steps were cleaning the lower inside and harness and coin box. All done without pics...

So it's done.....OK, three more things to do: put a heat-sink on the bridge rectifier, install some velcro on the card-board bezel (so it is removable) and make a back-door. The first two things I'll do before Eurocade (don't want the rectifier to fry during Eurocade)......

Oh and of course it needs a proper Atari Italia bezel.....but preps for that are being done by Vernimark "as we speak"

Anyway some "after" pics:

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Shiny ? Mwaaaaoooohhhh