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[Spirantho]

Hi everybody,

As well as collecting every Atari cart I can get my hands on, I`m also getting the pirate clones... but one of them has a problem!

It appears that the display of the "ball" graphic is being displayed sometimes at the wrong place (I think it's the ball - either that or the missile). Whatever is using the ball sprite keeps flickering around the screen, usually to the far left. Internally, however, the game runs fine.

An example: In Venture, your dot moves around internally but will disappear to the left of the screen but still enter the rooms properly.
In Enduro, the track will flicker around the screen. Space Invaders - the bombs fall down the left of the screen at times.
but in Combat, there's no problems at all. Berzerk runs perfectly.

I've tried changing the voltage, from between 6V and 12V and all voltages have the same effect, so the regulator is working correctly. It appears to me that it's an internal error in the Atari-clone chip thingy. IIRC these clones had basically three chips - one was the "Atari" itself, one is the ROM chip (in this case 128 games I think - it says "2001 games built-in" on it but I've not counted the variations), and then another which is probably just a logic chip or something.

Obviously I want to repair this beastie as it's quite a good one, good TV picture etc., and because I never leave anything "kind of not working". If it`s not going to work properly, it may as well at least try and get repaired.

Before I take this thing apart again and start playing around properly, I was wondering if anyone had any ideas as to what may be causing this problem? My only solution so far is to get another clone and transplant the "brain", but that involves wrecking another clone.

Oh, one more thing - it appears to get worse with time or something. If I run it topless it seems to run better for longer. Overheating, maybe...

Suggestions please!? Thanks!