Problems with I,Robot

Other problems

Black Hole
Does your game/board do nothing but display "You have hit a black hole.....?"
This is a display that comes up when your board has some serious problems. There is no such thing as a black hole in gameplay, but at one point there must have been.

RAM chips
There are a couple common problems that occur with I,Robot. One is the RAM chips go bad. Apparently the batch of 6116 RAM chips Atari got had flaws, and just about every I,Robot has these chips in it. You will know when the chips start to go bad when you see gibberish on the screen. If you hit the fire buttons quickly in attract mode, the game will scroll through the screens fast, and sometimes you will see graphics from the previous screen mixed in with the graphics in the current screen. It will last only a second, but it is the RAM chips that do this. Usually the machine will not do this until it has been sitting on for a while and is all nice and warm.

Edge card connector
Another problem that all atari games have is the edge connectors going to the board burn up. You game may already have wires soldered to the board and spliced into the harness. No doubt anybody who owns/worked on several Atari games has seen this. But because I,robot has a different power supply, it reacts to this problem differently.

The power supply supplys voltage to the game boards, and "reads" a voltage back from the boards (Sense lines) so it can adjust itself to be as close to 5 volts on the board as it can get. The edge connectors get burned over time, and when they start to get bad, the power supply cannot read the voltage accurately, it thinks the boards have a lesser voltage, and supplies more voltage. Eventually, the connectors get worse and the voltage keeps going up until it hits about 6 volts. At 6 volts your boards will start to smell like burned electronics (you know that smell :) and after a while the game will turn itself off because of an over-voltage protection circuit.

This isn't really a puzzling problem, but on I,Robot it can be because everything in the game is wired through the power supply, and when the game shuts itself down, it turns off everything but the fan and marquee light! And the game will always work perfect from when you turn it on until the protection curcuit turns the game off. To fix this, either replace the edge-card connector(s), or splice in wires that bypass the connectors and go directly to the boards. Splicing in wires is easier and faster, but do it the right way! many people (or ALL operators) solder the wires from the harness right onto the board. Dont do it that way, you wont be able to easily remove the boards now. Extend the leads from the burned connectors (only the pins on the extreme 2 rows burn up as they carry all the power to the boards) and attach them to the +5 and GND test points on the board, and use quick-disconnect terminals so you can pull the board out quickly.