Asteroids Vector Distortion
Wednesday, April 12th, 2006
Asteroids has been a little on the fritz lately. When the game is turned on, everything in the middle 1/3 of the screen is distorted or missing. Sometimes the left 2/3 of the screen is missing. Take a look at the photo — the “PUSH START” is very distorted. As the game warms up, everything gradually gets drawn correctly. Unfortunately, a video problem like this is pretty ambiguous. It can be anything, either on the monitor board or on the main board. We have an advantage here, though. A problem changing as the game warms up is a good thing, whether going from good to bad or (in this case) bad to good. Problems like this are usually easy to troubleshoot with a can of freeze spray (I like to use a can of compressed air, held upside down.) This “warm up” change usually means that a faulty IC, transistor, or capacitor (or more than one!) is to blame and is making this change occur as the component warms up. In my case I had a faulty capacitor that was causing the problem. This is how I found it…
