As some of you may know, Pole Position gets a bad reputation for a few reliability issues. As I want this machine to survive the show without a hitch, I have performed several upgrades which should significantly increase reliability.
Firstly, due to the complex nature of the large PCBs ,they are very power thirsty. Atari had to add 2 AR2 power supplies to cope with this. I have added common ground wires to both pcbs and both AR2s. Next I ran crimped wires from the 5volt test points on the PCBs directly to the power supplies. This reduces voltage drop significantly and will stop the harness getting hot and the edge connectors burning.
Next I rebuilt the main power brick, including replacing the main "Atari Big Blue" as well as the rectifier and any corroded wires or crimp terminals
Next job was to remove the leak prone battery and replace the unreliable CMOS RAM with an NVRAM after modifying the PCB to accept it.
Lastly, several sockets were relaced with new on the CPU board as these are prone to being flakey.
With any luck, this should now be one of the most reliable Pole Positions in a long time.
Coming to a Replay show near you :)
