Reparing the Vector Monitor in a 1979 Atari Asteroids Arcade Game 

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I remember a time when the sounds of Asteroids was prominent at the roller rank, pool halls, arcades, and the bowling alley. Just 25¢ per game was all you needed. Great repair on a old classic!

That vector is just so satisfying to watch, especially when you press the fire button, And the pellet flying.

A friend of our family had an Asteroids in their basement back in the 80s so I would love when we would visit so I could just play the whole time we were there. What a treat at the time not to have to drain quarters from my pockets. Would love to have one now.

I still enjoy the overview and gameplay videos, but I'm really glad that you've increased the amount of these repair videos that you do, both video and pinball. It's fascinating to watch you sleuth through the possible causes until you arrive at the faulty part and I especially like that you go through the schematics and explain what should be doing what and why. Thanks for these.

Amazing troubleshooting job, I like your work very much. Congratulations on restoring this classic jewel!

Beautiful machine and great video! It's great to watch these arcade games get restored and brought back to life.

thank you joe for the final repair video on asteroids,which i have always loved,its pure simplicity,great sounds and addictive game play....its lovely to see it back up n running again and lookin great !! well done guys !! x the saskia and hope arcade lovers x

Great video series on Asteroids repair/restore. Thanks so much for making it!

It quite the fun journey watching this series. 79' was a good year. This classic came out and though off topic, I have a 79' Mongoose BMX I'm going to restore. I can't get enough of the videos on this channel!

I spend a lot of my time watching your repair videos :) it's crazy to think of these old arcade cabinets had so MANY little parts to make everything work. I am now more motivated/confident to fix my Atari Asteroids upright cabinet after watching all your tutorials

What an awesome serie of reparing a totaly wreck. This was very educational. Thanks.

Great video! I really appreciate you taking the time to explain all these things. I just picked up a battlezone and am pretty new to vectors. This helps big time!

I miss my Asteroids machine. I gave it away about 15 years ago. I played it so much and got so good at it that my scoring system was to see how many times I could turn over the score. :-) Thanks for these videos and channel. I'm a new subscriber. It makes me want to get back into owning a few of the original arcade games.

nice! I picked up for free an Asteroids deluxe looking very clean and everything is there, powers on but no video. I will be doing the monitor work you did.

Thats awesome! takes me back to 16 again,great job!!

Great repair video . Hint, you got to attack the asteroids, don't let them come to you. I remember just how much heat them old games use to put out. It was a hot time at the old arcade .

I love these type of videos. I love when you have to dig into the circuit boards and repair them. I also recently started watching another guy who only has like 200-something subscribers, and he just mainly works on boards using ROM testers and chip testers and O-scopes. You would definitely approve. Awesome video man

Rewatched this tonight to learn a few this for this vector noob.

Great project, thanks man

Thanks again for the repair videos. I really enjoy them. Not sure how you do most of them w/o a tripod - It may make your life easier. I'm restoring my first machine now and I'm working on a K4600. All recapped. The screen has a bit of a wave/swoop in it.. But I'm diving in this week to see if I can figure it out. I haven't seen if you've done a video working at the bench.. Would like to see those too - but grateful you spend the time as it is. thx

Nice 3 vids on this repair. I don't know anything about fixing this stuff.. but I been watching so many of your videos! It's amazing what you are able to do … Like @alpha trion92 said .. "Makes me want to go fix my arcade machine... " then I realize I don't even own one LOL Awesome series , and keep up the great work !

I know it is not appropriate for this channel ... but perhaps another channel could do an analysis of the software behind this game. Perhaps interview the developer. It was most likely written in 6502 assembly language. It is keeping track of multiple objects, doing collision detection, calculation trajectories, figures out how to blow apart an object in a somewhat believable way, controls the writing of the vector representations, etc. all on a little 1 or 2Mhz 6502 processor.

I'd love to have one of these machines in my house, first game I really cut my teeth on down at the local department store when I was a kid,

From the days when just *one* sound effect in a video game could go out because some circuit wasn't working, and this stuff wasn't all handled in software.

Nice it works fine great job done ...

I give this three part fix up two 👍👍 up!!!

Good Job.

Awesome. Stating the obvious, but an absolute classic. I spent many a happy hour playing this as a kid. However I was very disappointed to see you enter your name as Ron! I always assumed you were Joe

Interesting video. Mine is doing similar things, everything works except the monitor. It was working, and I left it on overnite, and the screen stopped working during the nite. So I will check on these. Thanks

At 23:15, when you powered up, there was a glow that intensified and went out. I thought maybe a fuse blowing but you didn't mention it. WTH was that? Loved the series on Asteroids. Besides pinball most of my paper route $$$ went into that game and I consider it well spent.

When we played these in 1980 we wondered how long the control buttons would work.

Great job. I loved this repair. Don't you find the new replacement bezel a little too reflective? Are there matte finish bezels available? Kind of like the difference between a shiny or matte LCD screen. Thumbs up!

Mine has vertical lines on the monitor, which warp and double everything that passes through that area.

good video bro

It's a common problem for Asteroids to play blind, and it is the board. I've ran into that issue.

But the one thing I have seen and also wondered. If Atari ever tried to program the rocks to hit each other and break apart. I mean the enemy ships hit the rocks they can break apart but not when the rocks hit each other. I always thought that was a little odd. And probably an unanswerable question. And my inner geek coming out.

Hey, thanks for this video! My Dad has an old asteroids machine he bought with his first payback back in the 80s and we've been restoring it recently. New buttons, high score save kit, and a new light starter to get the marquee working for the first time ever. The monitor works and looks great.. sort of, and I'm curious if you have any insight into this. Basically, the screen flickers. As in, the asteroids, high scores, and player ship goes from being bright to dim every second or so. It's not a slow flicker, it's instantaneous. It almost seems to happen at the same pace the player 1 and player 2 start buttons flash at. It's very strange. It's like the more objects on screen the worse it gets. I'm thinking it's probably some bad caps somewhere, but man I'm so not looking forward to recapping everything if I don't have to. If you have any ideas we could narrow it down to, I'd very much appreciate it! Google hasn't been much help, and it's getting harder and harder to find people who know stuff about this!

JOES CLASSIC, I'm confused what are the differences on the games motherboard and arcade monitor boards the differences between a raster arcade game compared to a vector arcade game. If you know the differences it would be nice to explain what are the differences please, thank you.

Great Video! Where did you locate the cover for the high voltage board? (Of course, mine is missing as well LOL.)

"It's better to be a little bit too small than it is to be a little bit too wide." Said no woman ever.

It looks so sexy with it's copper shielding.. And I want to worm up those cold solder joints and tweak the diodes. And the unedited schematics! Wait a minute.. Electronic circuitry porn? Is that a thing? And is that weird? Lol. Cool video though. Another arcade classics game lives again.

I don't think its dielectric grease, its the rubber compound that starts to break down. I have the same with a rubber gameboy classic bumper case. It starts to sweat and gets sticky.

Saucer hunting involves speed. Get one of the slowest, most vertical moving asteroids you can and leave it alone. Thrust vertically, up or down, and get up the max speed. When the saucer pops out, let off thrust, turn and learn to time 4 rapid shots across his path. *boom* Turn back and continue thrusting until the next saucer pops. The little ones may be "smart" but they have a hard time tracking a moving target. Just be ready to slow down real quick if your last asteroid gets blown up in the action. Get good at this and 100,000 points will be yours in no time.

I used to wonder how the game knew when not to put you on the screen too (when I was a kid), having coded for many years, I would suspect they're simply checking to see if the asteroids are within a certain distance from the center of the screen (where they game always puts you), and inhibiting the game from spawning your character if an asteroid is within that 'box' around the center of the screen. Using routines similar to collision detection. "If object is within this box, spawn enable = false". You could get a fancy though if you wanted to and calculate the slope and if an asteroid is within a specific quadrant (top left, top right, bottom left or bottom right), and the slope is either increasing or decreasing, you could determine if an asteroid is heading toward or away from the center of the screen, but I honestly don't think they're getting that fancy. I've seen the code, and because it's vector graphics, and there's no graphics data, the actual code is only like 4k, so it's pretty simple.

This is my favorite stand up arcade game. How did you fix the speaker? I've seen so many of these games that have the speaker on top; but never knew how to get to it if they ever need cleaned out or replaced. Even with your videos with the back panels off; I haven't seen where the speakers are accessible if their in the top above the monitor.

Really enjoying your videos. Great to see these old machines come back to life. One thing is bugging me a little: You might want to periodically warn people about discharging capacitors and being certain that everything is unplugged and de-energized. I know it's second nature to you and should just be common sense but CYA. I apologize if this has been covered, I'm not a big comment reader.

You can hear me? Ok now I am paranoid. Google Alexa got nothing on Joe's classic arcade. He sees and hears everything.

Friend….I have video but on only half the screen…right side. It’s the smaller asteroids machine…assume it’s the same. So essentially the screen would work…but… Gonna come at you for help….just divorced…I NEED…this up and running….just out of spite. Waving from Oregon.

Is there a reason you don't use the continuity function (the beeper, one setting below the resistance setting) for checking? It gives you a real quick way to check because it will beep with continuity.

I just picked up one of these from a client, it worked perfectly for a few months. But I turned it on for the first time today in a few weeks and it only displays one lonely white dot in the center. I can hear the game playing and the white dot fluctuates as the fire button is pressed. Any guidance would be beyond appreciated!!!

Hi Love the video I have the same game system but when I start up the game my screen is collapsed only have of the screen works. Any ideas on what it might be?

Let me know if the voices in my head are to loud for ya!!

Great video, I have an Omega Race and the image on the vector Monitor will pulse slightly , like its zooming in and out slightly, if I leave the game on for awhile the whole image ends up zoomed in and larger , so much so that it cuts off decent amount of the image. Any idea what it could be? Appreciate it if you have any ideas , thanks

The blooming issue regarding the diode. Is that the same for Raster monitors also? I have a 19v1001 is a Space Invaders that does the same when left on

See, my monitor lights up in the back where the tube is. But no picture. Weird

i thought it said 0.1 ohms, but it said OL. I'm not that familiar with using Fluke multimeters.

Hi Joe I can't get any reading on deflection board on both large capasitors. I have a asteroids deluxe. It looks like it each one controls one half of the board. Everything else checks out.What is the readings I should be getting for each one?

Looks fantastic !...how much do they sell for please ? how much to me ?

Those 0.47uF 35V are tantalum capacitors, better than usual electrolytes. Do not know if it is critical in this application, maybe modern electrolytes are good enough for old tantalum.

First, let me say that I love your videos and I understand that you can't save all of the world's arcade machines. But... I have an Asteroids Deluxe with a small issue. It works very well but asteroids and ships appear larger in size (2x size) when they are displayed in certain areas of the screen. The test pattern does not have perfectly strait lines but it does look pretty good and does not show a distortion where I would expect. I have searched the web but have not seen anyone else with this issue. I would like to fix this issue but since the machine is still playable I am afraid of breaking it while trying to improve it. Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated!

If only I had the cash.. My dreams and aspirations can never Mach up to my financial situation. Damn it. Oh well maybe some day.

It no's because there is a software collision detection system, before displaying the ship, check for a collision, then place ship, The maths for this is well over my head.

Is there a source for new vector monitors nowadays?

Could you fix my vectrex if needed?

I thought you where Joe but you put in Ron , what gives ?

It’s either cold solder, or cod sodder. You can’t have it both ways! Come on people. People? Come on. And guess what, ITS BROKE!