If you recall from part 1 of this adventure, I have been working on the Asteroids game over at The Airlock. Back in the heyday of arcade games, there was only ONE main purpose of an arcade game. That purpose is to collect money. As long as it can sit there with two coin slots and accept quarters, some arcade owners didn’t care if it looked or played good.
Of course we all know that people are much more likely to play a game if it LOOKS like it works. Oddly though, Asteroids actually has a lockout where if the game is not turned on, your quarters/tokens will simply fall right into the coin return. WHY the designers of Asteroids thought it to be necessary to protect people from their stupidity of inserting quarters into a game with no signs of life is far beyond me.
Other things will prevent people from playing a game as well or at least paying for it. In the case of this asteroids, it was dealing credits every time the trust button was pressed. Well today I discovered something else… Every time you insert a coin into the right hand coin slot, it would hit the rocket thrusts. BINGO! This made it perfectly clear to us that those lines were crossed.
I started by checking the wiring harness to see if those two lines were crossed but they were not. Moving on from that, I checked the board. Found it! There was a small solder bridge on the shift register that handled the coin and thrust signals. Apparently when I was sprucing up the board to get it working again, I got a little overzealous in places and in this particular spot, I bridged it.
Now we still have an odd problem with it. The jumpers are set for “1 coin, 1 play” and it says that on the screen but for some reason, one coin actually will buy you two plays. Why? Not sure. Maybe we’ll sort that out in part 3…
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