Help! Intv console crashes after title screen.

[salkatt]

Hi all,

I finally circum to getting an Intellivision console after 30 years, after being a life long Atarian.

 

Console off ebay with games, Immaculate condition and seems to work...except.

 

Powers up no problem, and displays title screen, but..

After selecting a game to start it crashes and goes blank screen.

 

Examples, soccer plays any where from 4 to 30 seconds.

Lock and chase crashes as soon as player one starts.

Rest of games crash shortly after starting.

 

But Pitfall works perfectly.

 

I have powered the console on for over an hour on title screen, and no problem.

 

Any one have any ideas what this would be?

 

I have cleaned, power switch, all carts and cart port.

 

I was thinking it may be a capacitor issue, but can't find any details on it.

 

have even lifted and resit the ICs (except the ones with heatsinks, as they are glued down.)

 

Help.....

[Purdy]

The way you describe this, I would go for a faulty IC.

 

Re-seating the ICs was a good start.....you have little to lose by cutting through the 'glue' and re-seating the remaining ones.

If you're careful you can leave the heat sinks attached to the IC, just break the bond between the IC and the board/socket.

 

I had a similar problem....mine needed a replacement CPU.

 

Can anyone else chip in here?

[+thegoldenband]

Unfortunately, this is a known issue with the Intellivision I, and there have been several threads, including one of mine, that describe similar problems. No one has really identified which component is the likely cause, though I've read that the CPU may be the culprit.

 

The Intellivision FAQ notes that "the chipset which provided the guts of the Intellivision, manufactured by General Instruments, was extremely failure-prone. During the initial production runs, there were sometimes failure rates as high as 50%!!"

 

I suspect that my Intellivision that crashes after < 30 sec. may have a bad CPU, but I'd tend to think that the one that takes 10 minutes to crash has a different problem.

 

If any of the tech-savvy folks are reading this (intvnut et al.), is there any way to use a diagnostic cart to figure this stuff out?

[+evg2000]

usually if something works for a while and then stops it's heat, and there is a bad solder joint. for my xbox 360 the way I fixed it was to buy a $10 heat gun from harbor freight tools, lay the MB down on a flat heat resistance surface and use the heat gun to reflow the solder ( i also beefed up the heat sink on the cpu/gpu) and let it cool for 30 minutes before moving it. This may be a way to fix an intellivision, if you run out of option you don't have much to lose.