Arkanoid help heeded

[Entropy42]

Edit: These problems have all been fixed, but now when I play, starting at the 6th level, 4 blocks appear in the upper left corner of my screen.  They are killable, but the silver one needs to be hit at a certain weird angle to break it (i must've hit it 50+ times).  I think they appear on all subsequent levels as well.  I have a picture of the 4 blocks if anyone needs to see it to know what I'm talking about.  Another thing that happened is that on the level with a circular ball of blocks in the middle, the blocks were all shifted about 4 squares to the right, and the rightmost 2 columns of blocks in teh ball appeared along the left wall instead (as if they wrapped around the screen).

Last year for Christmas, my whole family chipped in and bought me an Arkanoid arcade game (cocktail-style), as my one big present. This was awesome for a number of reasons, but sadly the person they bought it from on Ebay sold them a partially-working machine.

You can only move the paddle to the right.

Spinning either the 1st or 2nd player spinner left or right always causes the paddle to move to the right. Strangely, sometimes this isn't the case, and the 1st player spinner works fine (this is rare though and hasn't happened for months). My first thought was that the left and right connections were touching, so everything was interpreted as a left signal, but the wires seem to be fine.  I've checked the wiring, replaced the PCB, and tested voltages but I just can't figure out what's wrong with it.
If anyone has seen this sort of thing before or has any advice on what to try, please let me know.  I don't really know anything about restoring arcade games, because I didn't intend on having to restore Arkanoid.  

[Jabba]

Entropy42,

I have an Arkanoid upright at home. I'm not sure if the same wiring scheme is the same as the cocktail but it might be. A couple of questions for you...

1. Are both spinners not working? Does one work some times and the other doesn't? If both spinners are not working, it probably rules out a bad board on the spinner. I doubt the boards on both spinners would be dead at the same time. Could be a wiring problem. A loose connection, broken wire, etc...

2. A PDF file for the wiring scheme for Arkanoid Upright can be found at http://www.arcadedocs.com/vidmanuals/A/arkanoid.pdf. This might held to make sure wiring is as per factory setup.

I can take a picture of my setup if you think this would help debug the problem.

[Grauwulf]

Could be bad optic boards on the spinners, but for both of them to fail in exactly the same way is pretty unlikely. It still sounds to me like a wiring issue.

[Entropy42]

Both spinners have exactly the same problem.  The 2nd player spinner has never worked properly, but the 1st player spinner will sometimes work right (although rarely and not for many months).  I'll compare your wiring scheme to the one in my cocktail as soon as I can.  Thanks for the help.

It seems that this table was a conversion from something else, since the wires inside have all been spliced and there is no art.  Then again I've heard that all arkanoid cocktails are "bootleg" cause the game was never meant to have the screen flip.

The other problem I have is that the screen is slightly shifted to the right, and the right edge of the screen slants upward.  

[Jabba]

Could be a problem in the splicing. Did you test the wires between the spinner control and the harness connector? May be a broken wire in there that is sometimes touching thus sometimes allowing the spinner to work. 2nd spinner never working could possibly indicate a broken wire or a fried optical board, which you may need to replace. Maybe www.therealbobroberts.com would have one.

As to the slanting problem, do you mean physically (monitor misplaced) or on the screen. There are some dial controls on my Upright behind the monitor on a separate board that are used to control the horizontal and vertial position of the screen (kinda like on older TVs). These are located on a board behind the monitor. You may have them and can be adjusted manually. I've had had to fiddle with these to get it just right.

[RayB]

When you say you replaced the PCB are you talking about the GAME pcb or the small "optic" PCB on the spinner controller?

Have you cleaned out the spinner optics (if dirty)?

[Entropy42]

I replaced the GAME pcb, and I've never thought to try cleaning the optics on the controller.

For the monitor slanting problem, i mean that the screen is messed up, not that the monitor is physically misplaced.  I'll look and see if mine has any knobs on it to adjust the position.

Thanks for all the suggestions guys!  Now I've got more things to try than I have time to try them :-)  

[MonitorGuru]

I've seen the spinners only go one direction when:

1) One of the 4 wires is disconnected or has a short
2) The harness is connected backwards to the optic board
3) The harness is connected one pin off on the optic board.


I have 4 different arkanoid boards and know a bit about arkanoid, feel free to post pics and more details and I can try to help

[RayB]

PS: The monitor slant: It likely needs a cap kit.

[MonitorGuru]

Another couple of thoughts.

Spinners:
If the optic board is tilted or off to the side or not entirely centered over the optical cutout disc, this can affect the dark/light patterns being detected correctly and can skew the readings one way or another. Check this  and or post pics and I might be able to spot if it looks off.


Slant:
You may have magnetism by the tube or frame in that corner, though typically you'd see a discoloration as well

You may also have extraneous wires "hanging" by the yoke that are affecting the deflection. Clear out any wires, especially AC from the back of the tube area (like if the cord running to power the monitor is wraped upward and laying against the side of the tube

You could have a twisted yoke but that would show as a perfectly square "twisted" screen, not one corner "drug"

You could have lost the little magnetic tabs that are stuck on the back of the tube to bend the electrons better to a corner. These look like white plastic flat sticks usually with a red end painted on where the magnet is.

Someone may have done a tube and or yoke swap...yokes not specifically made for a chassis will give weird geometic distortions like this.

[Entropy42]

So last night I had some time to sit down with Arkanoid and test lots of things.  Everyone suggestions that I look closely at the optical sensors really paid off, as it turns out my controller issues (at least on the first player controller) were due to the encoder wheel being misaligned.  Really it was aligned quite nicely, but whenever it was centered between the 2 sensors it didn't work properly.  To get it to work, I had to angle the board so that the wheel was just barely touching the inside of one of the sensors.  
The problem is, after 5-10 of gameplay it starts getting progressively less responsive.  First it will only respond if you move slowly to the left and then eventually it just stops moving to the left at all.  Maybe its something that a new optics board will fix?  
In regards to the monitor, I took Jabbas suggestion and found 7! knobs that i could turn on the CRT.  None of these appeared to fix it, and i really wish I knew what each one of them did.  The monitor had sporadic sync problems so it was hard to tell sometimes what the knobs were doing.  Eventually i found a row of potentiometers along the CRT board, one of them was labeled VHold, and that fixed the sync problem, and I cant remember which one fixed the screen slanting.  The reason the monitor has been so flaky is that the potentiometers all are old and have contact problems.  So sometimes i didn't even need to adjust them, just wiggling them made the contact good again.
From testing the controller outputs with a multimeter, I found that the signal for left was weaker than the signal for right.  This was even more pronounced on the totally disfunctional 2nd player controller.

[Entropy42]

Update: These problems have all been fixed, but now when I play, starting at the 6th level, 4 blocks appear in the upper left corner of my screen.  They are killable, but the silver one needs to be hit at a certain weird angle to break it (i must've hit it 50+ times).  I think they appear on all subsequent levels as well.  I have a picture of the 4 blocks if anyone needs to see it to know what I'm talking about.  Another thing that happened is that on the level with a circular ball of blocks in the middle, the blocks were all shifted about 4 squares to the right, and the rightmost 2 columns of blocks in teh ball appeared along the left wall instead (as if they wrapped around the screen).

[RayB]

Definitely an electrical component problem on your game board. Could be a bad RAM, or other...

[Entropy42]

Bah, time to buy a new PCB then i guess.  By the time its all said and done this is gonna be one expensive arkanoid cocktail.