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Atari Star Wars
Question from Chris: I have an Atari Star Wars upright arcade machine. Everything works great except for the flight control. The cursor is stuck in the lower left side of the monitor. The cursor won’t move up, down, side to side. When I push the fire buttons it fires to the cursor. I have re-wired the yoke and tested it. I have tested the pots and they are fine. The Tie fighters and everything on the monitor look great. The pots are getting power. I don’t know what else to do to fix it. I am stuck. Please help! No resistors look burned. No fuses blown (I have checked them like 12 times). Thank you for your time. Chris
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Chris,
First off, make sure that you are calibrating the yoke correctly. According to the manual, Star Wars has a self-calibrating yoke. You should be able to calibrate it by quickly moving the cursor to all four extreme edges of the display. You can do this pretty much at any time (even during normal gameplay) and it should recalibrate. If the cursor remains stuck in the lower left side after trying this, you might go into the Self Test mode and see if the game is showing the cursor in the same position on the Pot Test.
If the cursor remains stuck and you’re sure that everything on the yoke itself is working correctly then you could indeed have an issue with your Star Wars board. There is a 2212 static ram chip on the board that holds the settings along with some calibration data. If this chip is malfunctioning, it could cause some issues with the cursor positioning. You might try replacing this chip to see if it solves your issue.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your question and good luck with your repair.
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