I used to sit at one of these with my lemonade and crisps as a child. Just watching the animations. It was in the main saloon of a North Yorkshire pub that had a lion in a side room.
i love you video's. i used to work for a vending outfit in idaho before i blew out my back. I did all the electronics repair by myself. nothing better then playing something you fixed yourself! and I miss all the video games i got to repair. and it was always a new challenge. keep posting.
It’s pretty cool you get to work with your brothers on a daily basis.
man I knew a guy who's dad found one of these things years and years ago, the thing is probably worth so much more today
So cool! Playing it on the oscilloscope is nutty!!
Very cool to see the old Asteroids come back to life. Also the first time I've seen Ron break out the scope. ++
Awesome stuff Ronnie. Love seeing this old, I mean vintage stuff come back to life for our generation to keep enjoying and for the next to experience.
I've always liked the aesthetic of the cocktail tables, for some reason. Of course, you didn't see many of them in arcades; most of these were in bars, or in my case, the student center of the local community college. It's nice that the circuit repairs were pretty simple, for the most part. Getting everything clean and restoring the top and those buttons (which are admittedly pretty nasty) will probably take more time than the circuit boards did.
I get flashbacks of working an arcade in the 90's when I was an operator assistant as a teenager. We managed many of the newer machines. I loved helping with the pinball tables the most. you make great content !
I liked the quick progression from start to working in one video. A little different than the segmented versions that I thoroughly enjoy as well!
Thanks for this video as mine started misbehaving a couple of years ago. I'll dig into it later on.
Wow. Seeing that play on the test screen was great. This brings back brilliant memories of when I was young playing the table version in my uncles Pub. I used to collect 10p coins just for this game. I Will look forward to seeing this restored !👍👍 well done people !!!
yep.. me too, put your quarter up on the table, and one in the slot to challenge.. you loose, i keep your quarter, you win, and you get mine and i step down for the next challenger.. loved those days. too bad we cant do anything like this today, no wonder the kids are all screwed up today.
I remember 10 quarters along the edge of Asteroids.... in the back of our pizza place.
Everyone knew whose $.25 was whose. No one messed with the line-up nor dared to steal a coin.
Integrity. Respect. Patience.
As well as BEST player keeping the machine, just like keeping a pool table once ya sunk all the stripes then the 8-ball.
As little kids, we learned the rules. Policed ourselves in the arcades. Unsupervised fun that taught morals.
Learned patterns and techniques. Coordination.
Left our mark in the 3-letter high score wall of fame.
To see if our "best" lasted until the next week.
No participation trophies.
I had a pizza shop with a pong game, switched it for a space invader cocktail game. It stopped working after 3 days, service came out and it was completely full (of quarters) woo hoo! Next big hit was Asteroids.. flashback to 1978. Lol
I loved going to the gas station in the early 80s to play Asteroids etc…
Great job, But you went the long way around. I never saw anyone play a game on a scope, that was cool. I worked on those old game back in the early 80s to the mid 90s. They all had self diagnostics to find bad ram even when them rest of the machine didn't work. Power supply was they place to start with AC ripple. .001 a/c would kill a machine but let it kind of work. Fun watching these fixum up vids. Thanks for putting them on !!!!
I just picked up an asteroids upright last week and it's doing the fast flash on the start buttons. Now I have an idea of where to start. Great video and walkthough of your process. Thanks guys!
i used to play this game as a kid. on that exact type of table to. i can remember going to a resturant that had a bar, dad would be at the bar, and i would be sitting at this table playing for hours, and at the same time drinking a buck rogers. old memories i thought i had lost forever.. thanks for the flashback.
I have a Donkey Kong Jr Cocktail that is in bad need of restoration. Would love to get it fixed one day.
Ronnie, your banter with Joe is FUNNY! "Top of the line." I loved Asteroids and I also loved the cocktail cabinets. Well done! It's clear that having your level of experience saves time and effort. For example, knowing that those diodes often cause trouble. And which caps will likely need replacement and which will not. You know your power supplies, too. Nice choice, going with the 6502 early in the game. Interesting how that test mode works audibly. Loving the use of the oscilloscope as a monitor! Great show, and Joe should hang onto you like gold because you're a national treasure.
Awesome joe glad it survived I love findings like that’s a good one
I will forever love this game. I was 14 when this came out, and if there was ever an arcade game that I actually got "good" at, it was this one. For some reason, the controls and strategy just made intuitive sense to me. I recently visited the Pinball Hall of Fame in Vegas (your videos made me inspired for some EM action!), and ended up spending an hour playing their Asteroids game! Thanks for the video.
In Greater Houston? Check out ' Game Preserve ', in the Woodlands & Webster. 80's theme Jukebox and MTV videos play on overhead projector. Fridays/Saturdays.
I once found a chip lifter inside an old arcade cabinet never knew what it was for until just right now. I still have it but i use it for paint cans and hubcaps.
I don’t understand how any of it works, but it’s really awesome. Thanks for the video.
Yay! Any day where an Asteroids machine gets brought back from the dead is a good day!
Love watching this stuff. Thanks for sharing your knowledge so others can resurrect and restore these nostalgic machines.
Amazing, love how you repair these old games. I used to love playing Asteroids in the arcade.
Best arcade game ever. Love the fact you are preserving a bit of history.
Sweet cabinet...never seen a cockatil of Asteriods. I've been really enjoying your videos. I'm not sure why but it's quite relaxing to watch you troubleshoot the boards :)
That was really entertaining, one of my all-time favourite games. The 2N3055 "bottle cap" is a high current NPN transistor, slaved to the regulator in the small can as you point out. It delivers all the current. For gentle IC contacts cleaning, I use a small fibreglass pen. Great! Keep it up!
That's a piece of my youth there.😋
Really great video, I loved the troubleshooting methods displayed here, very informative and almost like a good mystery. I will admit having a soft spot for these cocktail machines. Great work keep it up!
If memory serves me well, the original Astroids game was also a systems test program for video and cpu performance on the Atari consoles. If the console has the original ROM, the test program could still be there. Astroids and Tetris had these test subroutines.
Just had one in and out in less than 2 weeks. Glad to see you use the word survivor instead of rare..
It's all relative, they're rare I guess compared to the atari 2600 cartridge of Asteroids but they sure made a ton of these too :) Thanks for watching buddy
Spent many a quarter in a machine just like this at the local pizza place. Man what memories
Wow that's nice! Last cocktail I saw was Eagle by Centuri at a Pizza Inn a couple miles from where I grew up.
Thanks - I have one of these that needs refurbishing ..
I had no idea you could use a scope like that, that’s really cool! Can’t wait to see it all up and running again.
Never seen one in the wild! Enjoy your videos so much just ordered a coffee mug and t-shirt. :)
@@LyonsArcade your consistent positive content about things I care about Pinball/video games is truly appreciated. Neat to see inside the machines and fun to see things working again.
The last games used on crt monitors were the best. I remember playing on one switched horizontally like this one and oh boy how beautiful it was. Such beautiful colours. If for some divine luck I would find one I would get it in a heartbeat.
Very very sweet :)
Been watching your channel and really enjoying the memories it brings me back to.
Ron you have a scope! A Tek scope even!! Haha proud of you bro!... PS: Seriously, you are THE best diagnostician I have ever seen. I enjoy each of your videos. Wish we had a guy like you in the avionics lab back in the day.
It looks like you've got another asteroids with some strange magic going on. :-)
Thanks for all your willing to make it right
I was today days old when I realized I could use my TDS210 as the monitor for a vector arcade machine. Never really thought about it before!
@@LyonsArcade Love your channel, sir! I used to have a small collection of machines 20 years ago in Australia (2 cabinets, 20-odd boards) and I'm trying to persuade my better half to let me put a cab or two in the family room... :D
Love those sounds. I built a "synthesizer" from an electronics magazine article based on the 76477 sound effects generator chip. SO much fun with that thing, and hearing those sounds again brings back memories. It sounds so old and crude but back then those sounds coming out of one chip were so fresh and amazing and sounded SO high tech! Like a micro-Moog on a chip.
Mines got an intermittent sound issue where it starts to hum and get quiet. New transistors, big blue, caps…
Hoping for a follow-up where we can see this classic machine up and running in all her former glory. Sweet content and top-notch trouble-shooting skills!
truly a labor of love. I always wondered as a teen of the 80s what would be the restoration and collection of the future. it's this. also... LED scopes? terrible. especially for THIS GAME!
Plexiglass! I swear EVERY machine in my area had plexiglass ALL OVER it. I never see that on machines on UA-cam. Survivor bias? Or maybe it was just the operators in my area? Neat to see some on this unit! I was beginning to think I had imagined all that plexi.
Awesome, happy New Years 2022 and thanks for sharing this beautiful game.
Interesting idea, to replace old screens with high end LCD oscilloscopes :)
Great video where did you connect the scope up to get the video output that’s genius !
Oh man I wanted to see if the darn thing worked also 1970s quarter in the machine. :-) never mind it definitely is going to need some work
I remember playing a "cocktail table" Asteroids game in a 'Spaghetti Company' restaurant in Tucson, AZ. in December, 1979. Now, ask me what I had for dinner last night.🤔
Good job ! It's the first time I see you using a scope ! Happy new year from France
i used to play the galaga cocktail arcade at this pizza place in Florida back in the 80s..man i plunked many quarters into that machine lol
The RAM test sounds like a Simon game... game play on lcd scope is definitely a win!
The big black what? :-D Interesting and entertaining video, big thumbs up!
I would love one of these and I have been playing a lot of the 'oldies' on MAME including this, also the deluxe ROM's, I have played ' Lunar Lander' which was fun for about half an hour but I bet that didn't make much back in the day, a bit slow I guess. Do you ever sell whole machines like this to Europe ? if you do what sort of ball park figure does shipping come in at ? I bet ridiculous money ! what would it cost to sell that to me in England ? I can't afford it but I am very curious ! neat to see the scope in XY ! hope the monitor is ok... Happy New Year to you lot and the chat...cheers.
We do sell them overseas sometimes, we have people set up their own shipping though, we got scammed out of a game once! Thanks for watching AndyMouse123!
That one looks familiar. I know where it came from. 😁
26:15 I was thinking: how is he putting chips in that have been designed and produced more than 40 years ago...
He must have a golden stack of new old stock he found somewhere.
Precious.
But some digging... the uPD2114LC (or 2114 RAM Chip) appears to be in production still. Ha! Amazing.
1024 words of 4 bits... My dad built a computer once with those chips and accidently shorted two legs on them while measuring, burning 4 of them.
I remember they cost about 12$ a piece then.... Expensive mishap.
Amazing to see these are still available (about 3 bucks a piece).
When I was in college in the 1908's I played the cocktail version of asteroids pretty much every lunchtime. It's consumed way too many hours of my life. I would definitely like to have one of these in my spare room/man cave.
Bro its awesome to hear vidya storys of a dude whos almost 150 years old. Congrats on such a high score of life
I’ll see how you finally coming to the 21st-century do using it and oscilloscope to diagnoses problems
How did you manage to have this display on your scope ? No Z axis on this board (unlike a Vectrex for example) ? I don't understand why we don't see the tracing lines between the objects on the screen ? Thanks !
How did you get into the game repair business ?
Did you buy a business that was for sale ?
Oh yeah. Asteroids cocktail :)
I've got a garage full of arcade machines and there's no warped boards on any. I want to sell them all just to get them out of my way.
This is very awesome, one of my favorite games!
Question: Where do you get the sockets for the RAM?
I'm working on a few SEGA Master Systems and need to replace some VRAM.
I actually have a customer that may have those exact sockets. He specializes in NOS for really old systems. Used to sell a lot to the DOD and NASA. The sockets themselves are generic - x number of pins by size, etc. Lots of strange stuff, but he has huge tubes of the sockets.
He'd love to just sell all of his stock out and retire, I think.
They also make socket strips. Cut off as many pins as you need and do it in two rows
I think that Big Blue capacitor increases the voltage higher because if you disconnect the Big Blue Capacitor the power supply voltage will by almost below HALF?
Slightly off-topic: you must be fully aware of MAME project which have been documenting arcade video games are well as possible because we all know, one day they are most likely all "gone". More things we can properly document in high detail, better.
MAME is where we get all of our rom codes if any are missing, they've done a tonnnn of work over the years. Thanks for watching Tommi!
Inadvertent internet first: Playing Asteroids on an early LCD oscilloscope with an original Asteroids control board
This is very informative.
The watchdog circuit is hardware-based. If the software is running correctly, it will regularly twiddle the watchdog port to let it know the system is alive. If the watchdog doesn't see any twiddles for some amount of time, it assumes the software has locked up and initiates a reset.
That's true, however in this instance the hardware had failed making the software not run, AND the watchdog not work at the same time (6502)
That's the weird part. In the schematic, I don't see a way to disable the watchdog, so unless something is constantly clearing its counter, it ought to be furiously strobing the reset line even with a bad 6502. The only thing that can stop it is to ground the "watchdog disable" test point.
20:42 $1000 garage door opener. For when your garage is a cold war bunker.
Fantastic video :)
Great Job
Do you use DeoxIT on chip sockets, Ron? Just curious. Other retro computing channels seem to swear by the stuff.
I would have to agree with Mr Guru, I don't like spraying chemicals on stuff, it doesn't make oxidation evaporate, it makes it puddle out under the chip, I'd rather just replace the socket if it needs it. Thanks for watching DarthEd77!
The monitor one these I remember after a few years the screen was burnt in where the bases were across the bottom.
I was thinking about space invaders, not asteroids
I hate the sense mod. Just make sure your edge connections are solid. You have no issues if the connections are clean. I'd rather blow a 5 cent resistor than blow up my game board!
Having the game picture show up on that LCD scope is simultaneously amazing and hilarious.
Little trick! Thanks for watching PCachu!