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This was my "Best Find". I loved Battlezone in college. Played it for LONG periods of time on one quarter. Then I saw this ad on February 18th 1998 on the usegroup....

"If you are looking for a BATTLEZONE and know how to fix them , here is a great deal.It is a really great looking game ,but I no longer have the space for it. Come pick it up in southern NJ for $65 or a working monitor for my Defender."
Hey, I live in Southern NJ! I wonder if...

Wrote him an E-mail the next morning. When I got to work, I found a reply. Called him and he told me that "I wouldn't want to leave there without it". CONvinced my father-in-law to drive me down to the shore with his truck to "look" at it. February 19, 1998, it was sitting in my garage! BZ1.jpg
I couldn't believe it. Now, it was SERIOUSLY DEAD. It lit up, but the "Spot Killer" light was lit on the monitor's deflection board. This is a safety circuit to prevent the monitor from getting any burn. It also is a warning that you are getting no signal to the monitor. When these monitors are working properly, they make a chatter noise. There was no noise. I was worried about the monitor being bad. BZ2.jpg
I flipped the test button. Nothing. Hmmmm. Tried it again. Heard some faint noise, VERY faint. Beep, Beep, Beep, Beeeeeep. Tried it again. The same. What could this be trying to tell me? I went out to the Battlezone page and downloaded the manual. Uh-Oh. Bad RAM at A1. Went looking for a new boardset. Nothing. Paul Frazee of Crazy Frazee tells me about a company called Eldorado games who will swap the boards for some cash. BZ3.jpg
Did the board swap with Eldorado, life! Well, sorta. The game was in Spanish. Adjusted a few dip switches and it was in English, but it was really looking bad. It was displayed with the top half of the screen showing the game and the bottom showing a bright horizontal line. Uh Oh, Monitor problems. It's not like you can go to the local appliance store and get a new Vector monitor to replace it. So, It would have to be fixed. Again Paul Frazee offered me some advice that one of the big problems with these monitors is cold solder joints at the pins where the various cables attach. Moving the wires would show things differently on the screen. I figured if I was going to remove the boards, I might as well do a Cap-Kit. Ordered a Monitor Get-Well Kit from Zannen (806)-793-6337. Paul sent me instructions on how to discharge the monitor's tube. Followed directions and the monitor works great. The game runs great! BZ4.jpg

An interesting thing is that my wife's neice's fiance comes over pretty regularly and helps me get machines moved from point-to-point. Of all the games I have, he keeps going back to Battlezone. I caught him hugging the machine one day. I went out and bought him a BZ of his own.

That's right, I actually went out and got one for him. He's always helping me move machines from one spot to another. I saw on the internet that there was one for sale in Northern NJ for $175.00. It was WAY Northern NJ. Manhatten, NY would have been a lot closer to me. I called him and told him that if he wanted to take the trip, that I would buy it for him. He agreed. We started out. We left at 7:45pm and arrived at the garage where it was stored at 10:45pm. We were home by 2am. Needless to say, we were too beat to even try and play with it. We had seen it running, it needs some monitor work and a good cleaning, but it's in overall better shape than mine. It even included a manual.

Work is still in progress, but here is what it looks like:

It's Dirty. It's in pretty nice shape though, the side art is really nice the controls are great except that the plastic handles are broken. BZ1 is getting some new controllers so that will help this one out. It'll take a while, but it looks good. BZII Close-Up
It's neat to see two of them next to each other. The green step is weird huh? We'll fix that. If not, we'll just play mini-golf on it. BZ1's Step is not attached right now, the panel that it bolts to is pulled out and needs to be re-attached. BZ1 & 2 in the lineup

05/17/00 BZ2 is longer living with me. I am told that it works quite well in it's new home. Since this page was originally written, BZ1 has developed crooked vectors on any of the writing (words). I've traced it back to being a wiring issue. I'm working on it's repair and will update the page when it's fixed.

05/20/00 Not a wiring problem. Pushing on the wires was flexing the board and causing a Tantalum Capacitor to short on the board. Bent it up and away from the trace it was touching and suddenly life is good. After changing the connector twice, I got tricky and started touching stuff. When I got to this one, major changes occurred. Pretty cool fix (just bending it). Looks great now! I'll do some minor cosmetics to it and call it finished!

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