Purchased this cabinet in very good condition from a fellow collector.
Attempted to replace some capacitors to fix an issue with tube going blank after a few seconds immediately after machine was turned on. This problem goes away after the machine has warmed up. Initially it looked like the capacitor replacement had worked but the problem returned a month later. Still not fixed, but there is a workaround by just powering the game off/on a few times once it has warmed up.
2022 – November
Added an EasyCoinup to the cabinet since there is no freeplay.
Had a minor issue with loose chips that caused a ‘streak’ on the screen and resetting during game play. This was likely due to it being shipped from Minnesota. This was fixed by re-seating the chips.
2023 – January
I noticed I’m getting some shakiness / blooming in the video. I started by going to KLOV and creating a post for it along with a video showing the issue. I found another poster who mentioned the issue here and posted this video.
Playfield lights were flashing and then going out during game play and attract mode. It turned out to be a relay, where a set of metal blades needed to be adjusted to properly make contact and illuminate that section of bulbs
Purchased the Asteroids Deluxe cabinet from a seller on eBay.
Purchased a replacement bezel shroud to restore the blue-screen effect. Also purchased an Asteroids Deluxe Monitor Sheet as a fall back in case that didn’t work.
2017 – June
Purchased a Braze Asteroids Deluxe Multi-game High Score Save Kit to keep scores and add the original Asteroids to the cabinet. (It also comes with Lunar Lander but I’m the proud owner of the nicest original Lunar Lander cabinet in existence 🙂 )
2022 – October
Tried to adjust the brightness only to realize the normal brightness dials were not readily visible. It turns out that the brightness and contrast pots are both on the video board, which is access by going through the coin door and tweaking the pots. I wasn’t able to go too bright and it’s misleading at time because the bullets are brighter than all other artifacts in the game so the monitor is brighter than you realize when just looking at the ship or asteroids.
Found that the ship would get blurry or scrambled when being rotated. At other times, it would rotate but it would turn really fast, making it too hard to control the ‘English’ on the shots where you can direct them into the enemy ships after firing.
I ordered a cap-kit I found online from Andys Arcades, but unfortunately what I received was pretty lame. None of the caps in the kit matched the microfarad reading on the existing caps nor those listed in the schematics. Several caps were missing from the kit altogether. I received a note with the kit saying “sorry this is so basic” which I interpret to mean “I keep lots of caps in stock and when someone buys a kit I just throw together a kit on the fly based on the game specs, but when I sold you a cap kit for Computer Space I realized that the game is so old that none of the required caps have values I keep in stock so I panicked and sent you about 1/2 of what’s need with values as close as I can find”. Thanks dude. 🙁
Anyway, I inspected the board and searched really nice updated schematics looking for anything related to rotation. The board looks really clean given its age. I did not see anything obvious but one small cap on the first board (the first is the memory board, the second is the motion board and the last one is the ‘sync star’ board) had a very slight brownish blemish on the top. I used my ESR meter to test it and the values showed it to be off by a good amount. I found a matching cap in my own personal stock and replaced it and to my amazement, that fixed the issue perfectly. Nice!
Cap with touch of brown on top that ended up being replaced
Install EasyCoinup; I had one for it but I had to use it for Star Wars after I destroyed the first one by using too much heat while soldering the wires to the pig tails on the EasyCoinup (they are very very delicate)
Spy Hunter
Check the board voltage. On startup the screen does horizontal scroll for a few seconds. Not sure if this new: the screen takes a few seconds to warm up so it could have been happening all along and I wouldn’t have noticed until I was turning the machine off/on during other fixes and the warmed up screen would show up fast enough to reveal the problem. I replaced the potentiometers on the linear power supply so I should make sure I’m getting the correct voltage at the PCB to be safe.
