VECTORLIST - The Mailing List For The Technical Discussion of Vector-Based Arcade Games

March_1999
RE: Zektor speech/spinner


From: Clay Cowgill ( )
Date: Mon Mar 22 1999 - 14:19:20 CST


> My spinner doesn't seem to be working properly when
> I play Zektor. It will work for the most part and then the
> ship will flip about face 180 for no reason, I still have
> spinner control, it's just that this random flipping about
> makes it hard to play. I did have to replace a few IC's
> on the spinner PCB (Clay's not Sega's) due to an
> accident that happened when company was over : (
> But I replaced all the IC's and used 74LSxxx parts,
> and the spinner works great when I play Tac Scan or
> Star Trek. Any ideas...
>
Yep, I can prescribe a fix for that one. On the spinner board the chip
in the lower-left hand corner should be the counter. (I think it's a
74LS393 or something.) Install a .1uF ceramic capacitor across its
power and ground leads. (Pin 7 and 14 if it's a 14 pin chip, 8 and 16
if it's a 16 pin chip-- I don't recall.)

Bypass in that corner of the board was crappy due to me assuming that it
would be OK if I left one bypass cap off the design... Whoops. This
only affected the first batch of spinner boards, and the ones I shipped
had the extra bypass caps installed-- you might have replaced the IC
without adding the cap though.

After that it should be OK. On subsequent runs of the spinner board I
added the bypass...

-Clay


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