Darths and Droids did it again
Help us, Jar-Jar Binks. You're our only hope
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Sunday, May 18, 2008
An old game revived
Last summer I cleaned up our old copy of MB's Dark Tower, a hybrid electronic/board game from 1981.
Thanks to a repair service for the game on eBay, I was able to perform some diagnostics and decide on a probable cause for our problem and a fix.
To understand the problem, you have to know that the board game is basically a race around the board between up to four players, all the while fighting obstacles controlled by the Dark Tower in the center of the map.
The tower is a sturdy plastic construction, with a window along its side allowing the players to look at a single
column containing a two-digit LED display on top of three back-lighted icons. The icons are actually on a plastic cylinder that can rotate inside the tower. There are 5 x 3 icons in total.
The tower keeps track of the players' progress and inventory of soldiers, food, and equipment.
....
I finally checked the motor separately, and found it was running well. But the tower would not even start the motor - maybe because of a problem with the light sensors? If one of the two diodes were broken, we were
hosed, but I checked the circuit board, and found some reddish gunk around the light sensors.
The stuff tracked two circuits and I found some of it between two soldering joints - when I scraped off most of it and cleaned the space between the two joints I connected all components and switched on the tower.
The display showed the single [0_], followed by two blinking dashes [--]
So far, so good. So I did not break anything that worked before.
I pressed a key on the membrane, and the tower started whirring... BINGO!
The tower positioned its open window in front of the three bulbs and lit each of them in quick succession - it started its test sequence!
We played a game with the kids, and put the thing to rest again for next time.
Next project: Find a way to get rid of the batteries and replace them with an external power supply.
Thanks to a repair service for the game on eBay, I was able to perform some diagnostics and decide on a probable cause for our problem and a fix.
To understand the problem, you have to know that the board game is basically a race around the board between up to four players, all the while fighting obstacles controlled by the Dark Tower in the center of the map.
The tower is a sturdy plastic construction, with a window along its side allowing the players to look at a single
column containing a two-digit LED display on top of three back-lighted icons. The icons are actually on a plastic cylinder that can rotate inside the tower. There are 5 x 3 icons in total.
The tower keeps track of the players' progress and inventory of soldiers, food, and equipment.
....
I finally checked the motor separately, and found it was running well. But the tower would not even start the motor - maybe because of a problem with the light sensors? If one of the two diodes were broken, we were
hosed, but I checked the circuit board, and found some reddish gunk around the light sensors.
The stuff tracked two circuits and I found some of it between two soldering joints - when I scraped off most of it and cleaned the space between the two joints I connected all components and switched on the tower.
The display showed the single [0_], followed by two blinking dashes [--]
So far, so good. So I did not break anything that worked before.
I pressed a key on the membrane, and the tower started whirring... BINGO!
The tower positioned its open window in front of the three bulbs and lit each of them in quick succession - it started its test sequence!
We played a game with the kids, and put the thing to rest again for next time.
Next project: Find a way to get rid of the batteries and replace them with an external power supply.
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