2014 August
Purchased Red computer space from a local friend
2022 October
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!
