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Arkanoid help heeded

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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.

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