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What makes the Astrocade Unreliable and what are the fixes?


Lendorien

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I've long heard about the unreliability of the Astrocade. What contributes to its poor reliability? Was it the components used? Bad design?

 

What are the most common causes of failures and what are the easy things to fix and what are the brick type ones?

 

I've thought about picking one of these up, but I want to know more about it before I do. Is it worth picking up a cheap broken one if you have some amount of electronics ability? Or is a broken one just good to keep a door open?

 

Plus, having all the info in one place might be helpful to others who might jump in someday.

Edited by Lendorien
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Phew. Seems like a real turkey. Poor Quality Control and bad engineering. You can't help comparing it to contemporaries like the VCS and Intellivsion. As a counterpoint to the Astrocade, both are rock solid systems that rarely fail.

 

Overheating because of the RF shield? Custom chips randomly failing? Yeah, bad engineering for sure.

 

I don't have the money to muck around with something with so many pitfalls. Passing on this one. Yikes.

 

Sadly, it won't be long before there are none left because of it. Sad story.

 

Thanks for the link!

Edited by Lendorien
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I officially declare my virtual Astrocade to be the most reliable one ever made! It hasn't failed yet, and its over 10 years old. It's pretty much immune to overheating and overvolting. Immune to the ravages of time. But if you should manage to break it you can fix it in the blink of an eye. It's so simple any dummkopf can effect repairs.

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My experience with the Astrocade is this: if it works, leave it alone. Don't go trying to remove any RF shielding. If the system made it 35 years with the RF shielding, there's no reason to remove it now. Especially since--and this is where my experience comes in--removing RF shielding can mysteriously cause a perfectly functional Astrocade to no longer be so, such as what happened to two of my former Astrocades.

The Channel F can be a pain in the ass to get working as well. I've had five or six of them over the years, only two of which I'd call 100% (and one's actually more like 98 or 99%...it requires its own ancient TV with fine tuning or it doesn't quite display correctly).

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Phew. Seems like a real turkey. Poor Quality Control and bad engineering. You can't help comparing it to contemporaries like the VCS and Intellivsion. As a counterpoint to the Astrocade, both are rock solid systems that rarely fail.

 

Overheating because of the RF shield? Custom chips randomly failing? Yeah, bad engineering for sure.

 

I don't have the money to muck around with something with so many pitfalls. Passing on this one. Yikes.

 

Sadly, it won't be long before there are none left because of it. Sad story.

 

Thanks for the link!

 

Turkey? No. Poor quality control? Perhaps in the first release, the Home Library Computer, but I would say the subsequent models (Professional Arcade, Computer System and Astrocade) turned out pretty well. The single most damaging component to the system is the RF shield, which while it went through some changes was never properly addressed or more importantly never properly redressed down the road to account for the detrimental effects it had on heat exchange within the console.

 

My best guess is that is the reason for such a high failure rate among the consoles, that the damage has already been done to them at some point, which is why by the time people are buying them on the secondary market they are prone to failure. I do not believe there is any "random" failure of anything, again pointing the finger at the damage from the shield.

 

Keep in mind that the shield was a "fix" as far as I understand it, to satisfy some FCC issues with RF interference, and not part of the original design (aside from the original plastic shield which had some kind of coating, the subsequent shileds look to be pieces of sheet metal, cut and almost folder in half around it. Might just as well wrap it in tin foil). I could be way off with this but it may have been Atari's attempt to sabotage Bally and keep their console off the market (I believe there is some information on this, maybe some of the Bally gurus can chime in).

 

Interesting fact that two of consoles I acquired in a collection from a former Bally employee have no RF shield whatsoever nor any evidence that they ever did. So at least in house it looks like that how they ran them, and it appears that the original design of the motherboard and venting works just fine.

 

Had the system been released as it was originally designed I don't think we would be seeing these issues, which is a shame as its one of the most powerful and expandable systems of its time.

Edited by TMOSteel
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It wouldn't surprise me if the RF shielding was a last second addition forced into the Astrocade by the FCC. From what I've read over the years, the FCC couldn't seem to make up it's mind what it wanted to do about emissions from the computers of the late 70's. Look at how heavily shielded the first Atari 2600's and computers were to make the FCC happy! I have two Astrocades and they were still working a couple years back. I really need to dig them out and play them again. The biggest issue is thay a lot of people simply sat these units on carpets when playing them, plugging up the vents and overheating the units. Yes, I killed my first Astrocade doing that, learning the lesson the hard way!

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You can see a faint glow in my profile picture. That's my laptop cooling fan underneath the unit. I'm having a lot of success, and although this was an expensive endeavor and I needed major expert help, this is quite a fantastic machine and I absolutely adore it. I just hope it lasts!

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You ahve to keep in mind that the Astrocade hardware was originally arcade hardware. The chips were sitting in a giant cabinet with large vents.And

Suddenly it get all crammed deep in a tiny place, and with and added shielding asked by the FCC because LOL why not? (those shielding never existed in Europe or Japan).

Also, there are electric issues, again, because in an arcade, you can put a giant bloxk with all the regualtion and filetering, and suddently you have to fit all on a tiny board and a little block.

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Well for computers and consoles of the 80's it definitively made them worse.

It goes true for the Astrocade, but also any other machine of the era.

 

Some (probably late) Intellivision sold in Europe came with no shielding (I suppose the one coming with shielding date from early runs, and Mattel Europe realized that the FCC rules didn't applied in Europe).

I run an Intellivision sometime for a retrogaming club; the shielded model always end up overheating and locking up after 4/5 hours, the unshielded one never does that.

Unless you know for sure that your systems use the shielding for something else (grounding, heat dissipator like the ridiculous stick of metal in the Bally) do your old systems a favor and remove those wonky metallic shells.

Overheating KILLS electronics.

You can also go buy thermal glue and slap some passive radioators for your systems. Many system came without them (the Intellivision is a good example, but the Bally is one, too) but it can not hurt to help dissipate the extra heat.

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