Star Tech Journal

8
STAR*TECH JOURNAL/AUGUST 1983
ATARI
STAR WARS HARDWARE
By Don Becker, Atari, Inc., Somerset, NJ
PRICE
CONVERSION
BREAKTHROUGH!
FOR ROWE
CIGARETTE
'MACHINES
• Will vend up to $1.75 in
increments of 5¢.
• Same mechanical
dependability using your
present totalizer. No
electronic components.
• Accepts any combination of
nickels, dimes and quarters.
• 4-minute installation on
location OR
• Send us your totalizer - we
will convert it ($5.00 service
charge).
PRICE
REDUCED
With the release of Star Wars, Atari has
introduced a new color XJY game system. The
new system uses three boards: the Analog
Vector-Generator (AVG) PCB, the Main
PCB, and the Sound PCB.
The A VG board contains the circuitry used
to generate vectors and draw lines on the
screen. It has 12K of vector RAM and 4 K of
vector ROM. Vector RAM and vector ROM
are both addressable by the Atari Cat Box
( computer assisted troubleshooter) through the
diagnostic connector on the Main PCB (for
addresses and checksums, see table I). The
Vector-Generator is pretty much standard Atari
fare, except for the custom address controller
at 2J. If you have worked on Atari games like
Tempest or Gravitar, you should have no
problems with this board.
The Main PCB contains the 6809 micro-
processor, 48K of program ROM, 2K of
program RAM, switch inputs (both control
panel and option), and the matrix circuitry
which performs the math necessary for three-
dimensional graphics. Table I lists the RAM
addresses, ROM addresses and checksums
you can test with the Cat Box. Note that there
are 2 checksums listed for ROM 0: one when
MPAGE is high and one when MPAGE is
low. This is because ROMO is a 16K ROM,
and the Cat Box can only take 8K checksums.
The signal MPAGE is actually address 13,
which is the highest order address of the ROM.
With MPAGE low, you can check the lower
8K of the ROM, and with MPAGE high, you
can check the upper 8K of ROM.Remember
when taking checksums that HALT (pin 40 of
the processor) must be grounded and WDDIS
ADDRESS
0000- 2FFF
3000- 3FFF
4800-4FFF
5000- 5FFF
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TABLE 1: STAR WARS MEMORY
DESCRIPTION
CHECKSUMS
Vector RAM
Vector ROM (4K)
9101
RAM
MB RAM
6000- 7FFF
ROM 0-136021-114
BEE4- MPAGE Low
A736- MPAGE High
8000- 9FFF
A000- BFFF
C000- DFFF
E000- FFFF
ROM
ROM
ROM
ROM
571E
730D
F839
0210
Notes: 1. Ground WDDIS.
$29. 95 (In Lots of 10)
1 to 9 Units - $34.95 each
(Watchdog Disable) must be grounded too.
Grounding the HALT line puts the processor
into its high-impedence state, allowing you to
take checksums with the processor in place.
You can also remove the processor and take
checksums, in which case you only have to
ground WDDIS.
Now to put MP AGE low,just reset the game.
To put MP AGE high, you must write data 80 to
address 4684. All the other ROMs are 8K and
you can check these just like any other ROM.
The Sound PCB contains its own 6809
microprocessor, 16K of ROM, 2K of RAM, a
speech synthesizer, four custom sound gener-
ators, and a stereo image synthesizer. To test
RO Ms and RAMs on the Sound PCB, you will
have to get the 6809E Cat Box adapter, which
should be available by the time you read this.
The two sound ROMs contain the program,
sound tables, and vocabulary for the TMS-
5220 speech synthesizer. The use of this chip
gives Star Wars some of the best speech
synthesis heard yet on a video game.
In addition to the regular self test, Star Wars
also has some special diagnostics built in; these
are accessible via the dip switches on the main
PCB. Unfortunately, these did not make it to the
first manual printing; they should be in the
second printing. These tests are to isolate and
troubleshoot specific hardware faults. Due to
limited space, I cannot cover them this month,
but fll try to cover some of them in a future column.
By the way, a good point to remember when
troubleshooting is that the Sound board does
not have to be plugged in for the rest of the
game to work. This makes it easy to access all
the chips on the Main PCB.
1 -136021-102
2-136021-103
3 - 1 36021-1 04
4 - 136021-206
2. Ground HALT (Pin 40) or remove processor.
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