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Atari Road Runner Arcade - PCB Unboxing & Power Brick Fix - Can we save it?

RetroRalph·video·18m 31s·analyzed·Aug 27, 2021
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Analysis

claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 · $0.019

TL;DR

RetroRalph tests Atari System 1 Road Runner components and fixes the power brick capacitor.

Summary

RetroRalph unboxes and tests components for a non-working Atari System 1 Road Runner arcade cabinet acquired from Captain's Auctions. He successfully replaces a failing capacitor in the power brick using an upgrade kit, then validates all components (main board, game cartridge/PCB, control panel, audio board, wire harnesses) by testing the Road Runner cartridge in his working Road Blasters cabinet. All parts function correctly, setting up for a part-two cabinet restoration.

Key Claims

  • Road Runner requires a hall effect joystick to play correctly; emulation with an 8-way joystick will not work properly because the game responds to analog input intensity (more push = faster speed)

    high confidence · Jon (RetroRalph) explaining the control panel specs and gameplay mechanics

  • Atari System 1 architecture was intentionally designed to be modular, allowing game cartridges and control panels to be swapped without major changes

    high confidence · Jon discussing System 1 design philosophy during board examination

  • The power brick capacitor on these Atari systems degrades over time and should be proactively replaced rather than waiting for failure

    high confidence · Jon explaining the rationale for using the Mega Capacitor upgrade kit from arcadepartsrepair.com

  • Isolation transformers are essential when powering arcade monitors—direct AC wall outlet connection can damage the monitor chassis

    high confidence · Jon recounting a personal lesson learned when he blew out a monitor chassis by testing without an isolation transformer

  • Some arcade owners mount the replacement capacitor externally with wires instead of replacing it internally, which Jon considers 'sloppy'

    high confidence · Jon criticizing the external capacitor mounting approach observed on some Road Blasters cabinets

Notable Quotes

  • “So if you've played it on an 8-way stick and you're like, this game sucks, or it's too hard, it's because you're not playing it with the right controller.”

    Jon (RetroRalph)@ 2:22 — Explains why Road Runner's gameplay feel is fundamentally different under emulation with standard joysticks vs. the original analog hall effect joystick

  • “This is a really big pair of pliers for this job, but I just need to give it just a little twist... I have every tool up here but that. Of course. Why would I have the right tools for a job? Why?”

    Jon (RetroRalph)@ 10:19 — Humorous self-aware commentary about the typical arcade restoration experience of improvising with suboptimal tools

  • “This is retro arcade at its maximum level where I don't have the right tools to do something and now I'm just taking a job that takes two seconds and making it a million times longer.”

    Jon (RetroRalph)@ 11:19 — Characterizes the reality of DIY arcade restoration—improvisation and persistence despite setbacks

  • “So we have all the parts to put it together. Now the question is, is all this stuff going to work?”

    Jon (RetroRalph)@ 7:33 — Sets up the central tension of the video: whether all the supposedly-tested components will actually function

  • “Yes! Okay, so the board works. That's good. That's good stuff.”

    Jon (RetroRalph)@ 16:28 — Moment of success when the Road Runner PCB boots successfully in the Road Blasters cabinet

Entities

Jon (RetroRalph)personRetroRalphpersonAtari System 1productRoad RunnergameRoad BlastersgameCaptain's AuctionscompanyArcade Parts RepaircompanyEtsycompanyMega Capacitor (Deluxe) Cap Kitproduct

Signals

  • ?

    community_signal: DIY arcade restoration is characterized by improvisation and the need to work with non-ideal tools; there is a known community pattern of external capacitor mounting (wired out) rather than proper internal replacement

    medium · Jon observes that some arcade owners mount replacement capacitors externally with wires and criticizes this as 'super sloppy'; he encounters multiple tool limitations during the repair

  • ?

    product_strategy: Arcade Parts Repair offers a proactive capacitor replacement kit (Mega Capacitor Deluxe Cap Kit) for Atari power bricks to prevent degradation; Jon opts to replace the capacitor as preventive maintenance rather than waiting for failure

    high · Jon purchases and installs the upgrade kit from arcadepartsrepair.com, explaining 'I'm not even gonna wait for it to go bad. I just going to replace and eliminate that from the equation.'

  • ?

    technology_signal: Road Runner arcade game requires analog hall effect joystick input to function correctly; standard 8-way digital joysticks used in emulation and some arcade cabinets cannot replicate the intensity-sensitive steering mechanic

    high · Jon explicitly states: 'this game, under emulation, doesn't really work well' because 'the more you push in this direction, the faster Road Runner will run. So that's why if you ever tried to play this game under emulation, it won't play right with an 8-way joystick.'

Transcript

youtube_groq_whisper · $0.056

0:00
Hey guys, welcome back to the channel. So the last time we were looking at the other Atari System 1 cabinet I have, the Roadrunner, it didn't look so good. We got it from Captain's Auctions, it didn't have a system board, it didn't have a power brick, it really didn't have anything. It had a monitor, so that's good. But I was able to acquire all of the parts for that system. So in this video, we're going to figure out, can we save it? Now we may not put all the parts inside the cabinet in this episode, so it might be two parts. But my goal here is to test all the parts that we got, so we're going to unbox those together and see, do they all work? And if they do, then maybe, maybe we can save it. okay so we're in the guest room downstairs in my house and this room sort of becomes spillover for kind of arcade stuff, project stuff. It's not okay. I got to clean it out of here soon. But I've had this box in here for a while. This was the box where I was able to obtain the Roadrunner PCB, which is the game cartridge, the actual main system board for the Atari System 1, and then the control panel. It seems like, I'm surprised it will all fit in here. So hopefully it's pretty well packed, but we're going to open it up really quick. The architecture of this is pretty interesting. And you know, I don't know if you've never looked at a System 1 before, then you may not be aware of, you know, it's not super complex, but I guess they did it that way because they wanted the architecture to be modular, you know, which makes sense, but they never really released as many games on the platform as I think they wanted to before they moved on to their next architecture. Anyway, okay, so let's see what we got in here. The control panel is right here. Oh, wow, the control panel is in really good shape. Oh, man, that looks good. Oh, he wasn't joking. He said it was in good shape. Look at that. That's in great shape, and here's what's cool about this. So this uses a hall effect joystick. So this joystick, it's like almost like a 50-way joystick. So, you know, you can push it in any direction. So it's sort of like an analog stick in a way. But what's cool about it is on Roadrunner, the more you push in this direction, the faster Roadrunner will run. So that's why if you ever tried to play this game under emulation, it won't play right with an 8-way joystick. So if you've played it on an 8-way stick and you're like, this game sucks, or it's too hard, it's because you're not playing it with the right controller. So this is a game that, under emulation, doesn't really work well. So anyways, it has the two buttons right here. This looks good. Like, the artwork is good. There's the back of it. The backside looks great. And, you know, there's your 80,000 connections that go to the main PCB. Okay, so I'm happy about that. That looks really nice, and it's in really good condition. And everything was advertised as working. So we're going to set that aside because I want to see the main board here. Okay, so...
2:57
Wait, where's the main board? Oh wait, I didn't order a main board from him. That's right. I had a main board. I have a main board. That's right. I think. I don't think I ordered a main board from him. I don't think I did. No, I didn't. It's just the game board. Hopefully. I hope that's what the deal was that we worked out. So this right here is the cartridge. So believe it or not, this gigantic thing is considered a game cartridge. for the Atari System One. This is a game cartridge. So you can see all the game ROMs on or the ROMs for the game here on this and you'll see in the corner I'll do a close-up for you, but it says Roadrunner Atari Corporation, you know 1985. Another cool thing about this board that's really neat is they designed this board with standoffs and these standoffs are so you can test the voltages of the main board and the game board. So it's really neat. So when you're hooking this up, we're definitely going to want to use those. So because I'm going to use a switching power supply and then I'm going to use the power brick that I got. Now the system boards over here, I'm going to grab this real quick and I'm going to move this box out of the way. OK, so this gigantic thing is the Atari System 1 main board. It's huge. And you can see right here, there's two connections right here, right? These two connections or connectors is where the board the PCB for the game itself or the cartridge plugs in So it goes in like this so you need all of this to run the game But the cool thing is is if you have another game board You can remove a game board and put the new game board on and then you just replace the control panel with the control panel That you need now this isn all you need There a lot more so so far we have some pieces of the puzzle We have the main system board which you want to be careful with that We have the cartridge, right? So that's what you need for the game itself. You have the control panel, right? Then you need the wire harness and the power brick. Now the wire harness, well actually there's one more thing you need what's called the it's actually this one's called the audio to board so this is actually a brand new version of the audio to board so you need one of these this is your audio amplifier and you need a wire harness for that which I have at which I was able to buy off Etsy believe it or not someone does reproductions and then the rest of the wire harnesses are in here you have all those some of these go to the monitor some of these go to the speakers we're gonna have to figure this all out I'm pretty sure I can use my road blasters as a reference they're slightly different and then you have this is actually the Roadrunner control panel harness but this is just an extra because lucky for me the control panel harness is already on the last piece of the puzzle is the power brick so the power brick is has has your isolation transformer on it why that's important is you can't in most cases you cannot plug a monitor into into wall outlet AC you need to run it off of an isolation transformer so AC comes into the isolation transformer and the isolation transformer goes up into the monitor that's very important in the early days days when I didn't know what I was doing I was trying to test a monitor without an isolation transformer and I basically blew out the whole monitor chassis so yeah lesson learned don't do that so So I'll go grab the power brick and show you what that's all about. But basically these wire harnesses plug into this power brick to power various different components of the main board. Now one of them on the main board is there's an adapter right here. And you're going to see this little connector right here. There's a wire harness that goes from that to I think the power brick itself. I can't remember how exactly it goes. But I'm going to go get the power brick so you know what I'm talking about. But right now you've seen almost all the components that it takes to to build this thing. Okay, so this
6:57
really heavy thing that's the isolation transformer this big guy and It has a really giant capacitor on it too Thing is really heavy the only thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna replace this capacitor because These go bad over time and there's a there's an upgrade kit to replace this so I'm not even gonna wait for it to go bad. I'm just going to replace it and eliminate that from the equation. All the, oh man, this thing's freaking heavy. All the fuses look good, but yeah, all those harnesses plug into this and then you go to different various places within the board. One of them being the monitor, main board, the amplifier, and so on. So we have all the parts to put it together. Now the question is, is all this stuff going to work? Supposedly everything was tested. It all said, is it said to be working so we'll um we'll hope for the best all right guys let's let's move on to phase two what's phase two i'm not sure because when i make videos i have absolutely no script or direction so what happens next i'm gonna think about it when i shut off the camera all right okay so all we're going to need for this project is the actual unit itself we need a phillips head screwdriver and then we're going to use this this is our replacement capacitor this is the um the blue big or what is it yeah big blue so we're going to need that so for some reason on these particular systems or these particular power bricks people will replace these but they'll leave them on and they'll run wires to this externally, which I think is super sloppy. Like it's not like it's a big deal to do this. So you can get this thing on arcadepartsrepair.com. It's called the Mega Deluxe Cap Kit for the Atari Power Brick. So there you go. So what I'm going to do now is I'm just going to flip this over and you're going to see there's the wiring there, right there. And this does have polarity. So here's your positive side and here's your negative side. So what I'm to do is I'm just going to disconnect these wires and then try to take note of what's positive and what negative because we want to make sure we we we don mess that up obviously we don want to reverse the polarity of this thing that would be bad news so we just going to unscrew this and we should be we should make sure we keep track of what your positive and negative are. So I'm going to take these, I'm just going to move these off to the right hand side and I know those are going to be my positive. So the other thing too is they're all orange. So orange is going to be positive, purple is going to be negative. So just remember orange positive purple negative they're probably they should be colored similar or the same way on yours on your system as well if not just keep track of positive and negative maybe you want to label them that might be a good idea so alright so we got a remove that and there we go so we got our positive and negative side removed so what we got to do now is I'm just gonna loosen the cap from underneath here it does look like I'm gonna need a wrench to do that So just bear with me a second. I'm just gonna get a little wrench to unlock that really quick. Basically, I'll show you what I'm doing here. Let's turn that a little bit. So we're just loosening this little nut right here just so I can get in there enough. This is a really big pair of pliers for this job, but I just need to give it just a little twist. So I should be able to get in there. Think with that. There we go. So just needed to loosen it enough that I can... That's not quite enough. Let's see. Uh-oh.
10:34
Almost. Almost enough. I have every tool up here but that. What the heck, man? I have every tool but that. Of course. Why would I have the right tools for a job? Why? Okay, I think I got it. I keep saying that and it's not coming off very easily. Well, I lied to you. I said you only needed a screwdriver. This is so classic me. All right, let me see if I find anything up here to remove that. okay this should do it it's really small this area that you have to work here so i should i should be able to get it with this my gosh man come on dude but they do this like this oh there is a there's a flathead on one side ah that's lovely this is just retro ralph to its maximum level where i don't have the right tools to do something and now i'm just taking a job that It takes two seconds and making it a million times longer. There, okay, we can fit it out. We can at least get it removed now. Remember, purple was negative, orange was positive. Shimmy this guy out. This is what happens when you have rinky dink tools. Yeah, all right, it's not coming out, but that's cool. I was talking smack and this is the reason you get the damn thing out. It's like funny, because I have the right tool for this downstairs, just a hop, skip and a jump away, but we're not gonna go down there because I'm stubborn and I wanna do it right now. Purple was negative, right? I'll have to go back and watch the video. Pretty sure purple was negative. All right, so I think we can fit the new one in there. Let's see. So we're gonna take the new one and we're gonna put it into here and it's gonna need to be opened up, I think, a tad bit. Think we're gonna have to open that up a tad bit more. Okay, there we go. That should just go nice and easy. All right, there we go. We finally got it through. All right, so we're just gonna push this cap through. There we go, okay. Perfect, it was orange positive, purple negative. So we want to put this about like this. So remember the negative side is going to have, it's going to have this strip on the side so it's indicated by this little, you can sort of see it's like a band. So purple's negative. So what we're going to do is we're going to just unscrew this one part of it here. And then we'll get it all put on here nice. And then we'll tighten up that last section there. Okay what I'm going to do is I'm just going to put all these purple connections on the screw and then I can screw it back down. Just make sure they're all the negative connections. I don't want to mess this up. This would be bad if we messed up the polarity here. So we're just going to put all the negative connections and I want to start to screw it down into the terminal here and we should be good to go here in a second. Now one thing you want to make sure is make sure that this screw isn't going to hit the metal plate. So we're going to want to make sure we don't mount this too far down because it would short if it was going to hit the metal plate. Now I don't have the metal plate on it right now but there is a metal plate that goes over it. Okay, so we're going to get our orange wires now, and we're going to put our orange wires on this other terminal right here. And then we should be pretty much good to go.
13:28
Okay, so let's unscrew this guy. We're doing pretty good. We had a little minor setback, but we're doing pretty good. So remember, all of the orange connectors are going to be your positive wires. And then this will be finished, and then what we'll do is we'll go downstairs and we'll test. I'm going to test the PCB on the road blasters cabinet, because that already has a system one board in it So it should be fairly easy Okay now make sure that none of these wires are touching and what I going to do is make sure like I said I want to make sure that these wires the top of the cap isn going to hit anything so it could short out So I want to push it I want to push it like about right there and then I'm going to screw it down from the other side. So from the other side there's just a screw on one side of the of the bolt there tight. Again we don't we definitely don't want it to short out that would be bad news so as long as we get it snug enough that it's not moving and we should be good to go and again I don't know why people I mean it is a hard it is a harder cap to get out but I don't know why people would not mount it this way and mount it on the outside so go figure I'm not really sure why someone would do that but anyway so now we got a nice cap which is some nice clean power to this thing we shouldn't have any issues with power at this point so there that is finished we got our nice new cap it's installed correctly and now we can go test the PCB and see if it works the game board okay so the last thing we're gonna do is we're gonna take our running road blasters we're gonna open it up and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually see if that Roadrunner board works because like I said this system is modular so here's the system board and there's the cartridge so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna remove this cartridge which is the road blasters running game and by the way there's there's what I meant where people get lazy see that's the old cap and they just move the wiring to this one it's kind of weird I don't I don't know why they did that but anyways some people just I guess don't want to replace that one but anyways so we're gonna remove this cartridge plug in the roadrunner cartridge and make sure it works so I'm gonna go grab that real quick for sake of time I'm not gonna show the unscrewing of this I'll just show the attaching of the Roadrunner one. So I'm going to be right back with that. Okay, so here's the Roadrunner PCB. So what you do is you just sort of get it underneath these two connectors and then you just gently press up. Sometimes you have to give it a little bit of force. There, it's attached. Now, I'm not going to screw it in for purposes of this and then you need to install this connector right here. Now, I'm not going to go as far as to put the control panel on, so I just want to make sure that the board works. So let's power it up and see what happens. Okay, so this is the moment of truth. Alexa, turn on road blasters.
16:20
Come on. Uh-oh, I hear it. Oh, there it is. Yes! Okay, so the board works. That's good. That's good stuff. Alright, I feel like we accomplished something.
16:39
So... Sweet. I wonder what it would do if I pressed the gas pedal for road blasters. Nothing, I guess. Oh, wait. Let's see if I can steer with the...
16:50
It doesn't do anything. Anyway, I'm pretty confident that... Ah, damn it. I'm going to get the control panel fine. Okay, let's test the control panel and see if it works. We might as well now that we've gone this far. Okay, so I went and got the Roadrunner control panel. I put it on here, and we'll just see if it works. I plugged it into the right ports on the system board, and this will be the test. We'll know if the control panel works. We'll know if the game board works, and we should be good to go. Alexa, turn on Road Blasters. All right, there we go. Let's press. It's on free play, I assume. okay there it is let's see oh it looks like it's working all right i'm missing everything because i'm trying to film and do this at the same time so all right we got to end this video this video is way too long okay so what i'm happy about is that this obviously works so that's good so the roadrunner pcb works we fixed our power brick so we should be good with that and um yeah now we just got to take all the parts and put it into the actual Roadrunner cabinet. So that'll be part two. All right, guys, that's it. If you enjoyed this video, give me a thumbs up. Consider subscribing to the channel. Put your comments below. I want to hear from you. And that's it for now.
18:06
We will see you on the next one.