Recent content by Senil Data Systems

TL;DR If your Pac Man machine has buttons that can be lit, you can have them controllable, so if there's a credit on, the 1 Player Start button will light up, more than one credit, both Start buttons light. Also, if you want to switch between Pac Man and Ms. Pac Man, there's circuitry for that...

I fixed it. On the photo way up there (from 7.3.2018) in the bottom left corner are two hybrid "IC"s (small circuit boards with SMD components. The left one (facing left, oriented vertically) seems to be the sync separator/blanking shaper/whateverIdontknow. Let's number the pins starting from...

That'll have to wait for two weeks as I don't have immediate access to the machine. Next weekend are two repair cafes, so I'm next at the museum on 22nd. On first and second glance, the chassis looks identical to the one in the photo above. But I kinda remember that blue gain pot being populated...

Push. We have a SEGA Blast City here with this chassis. The picture is great when it works. But after some time (a minute, or several hours) the screen goes completely whacked. Superficially it appears to be losing sync. However it appears to randomly insert blanking on the video signal AND on...

Sorry, knowledge is zero here... but if you can dump the chip, maybe try wiping it (since it looks like you have it backed up anyways - is that the first 16 bytes of the Chip's RAM?) (the ERROR P11 was after breaking the three chips, the one remaining one makes the machine work, but the settings...

These have a battery powered RTC/NVRAM chip. If that one starts dying, the settings can go all screwy. And by now, the batteries in these chips are now usually either dead or dying. I'm not sure because I haven't messed much with these, but a combined RTC/NVRAM implies there isn't another...

I got mine here: (Warning: Wall Of Text is an understatement. It's a Space Elevator Of Text, almost 10000 lines. No pictures and more often than not I didn't even note the IC positions. No index either. They get updated from time to time, but I group similar machines, so have fun finding out...

Don't shoot the messenger! Usually there's a reason to why the watchdog is resetting the system. What you can try first is re-seat socketed ICs. Atari's IC sockets are known to be of low quality, see if that makes a difference. Or beep them out if you're bored. Is the machine trying to boot...

Checksums of the blocks from NEBULA (there might be one or two that are wrong) 04eb, 0aa5, af8c, 4473, 2910, 9c38, b797, 9d86, fb4f, 161f, 6aae, 24cb, 2e17, 460d, ae26, 3662, 7ba8, 3313, 5995, 06d9, 8492, 6b3c, 4c8f, 2258, dd0c, 4cd0, d8e2, 9f1e, bf82, 807e, 4198, f321, 6de7, bd6d, 410a, a10a...

The tower.txt contained in the tower.zip file I uploaded in this thread is generated by my conversion program and has the checksums from tape as well as one calculated by just adding the bytes. I can put together all the checksums for all valid(ish) blocks my program has converted. Knowing how...

Hi. I just got a Nebula tape including the dongle. Dumping it got 4 slightly different results, each with errors in different areas, but errors were few and far between in total and I always got a majority vote, so I took the two best reads and patched their faulty parts with the two other...

This time it took 1:20 to erase the EPROM and I had to give it 13V (the eraser wants 12)... but now I've got The Tower. The other stuff also seems to be working.

's that mean the test version I have is valuable and will be worth a ton of money someday? :-P Degaussing... have you tried holding the "ERASE" button in the cab for a few seconds? On ours it's next to the volume control. If it doesn't have it (or nothing happens), your monitor needs a new PTC...

It doesn't do the second screen after the Darksoft screen, it went right to the menu, on my machine the monitor wasn't at full brightness yet when the menu showed up. (btw. there's no limit on how much stuff you can put there as long as you allow operators to fast-forward it after the...

one word of notice, I upgraded the firmware in my Multikit last weekend and it took one hour to erase that EPROM... (after three 10-minute passes there were still zero bits left here and there, so I cranked the dial up and also inserted the chip slightly crooked, when it finished I rotated it...