Crystal Castles Finally Working!

Just wanted to drop in a quick post to announce that there is a fully-working Crystal Castles now in the gameroom. I had the board repaired after several attempts to do so myself. I also spent a ton of time cleaning up the cabinet so it can be placed in the arcade. I plan to follow-up with a post just covering how I cleaned this thing up so nice.

As I posted when I first got this game, the PCB was not working correctly. It was not drawing gems or wiping the moving background. I tried checking several of the components on the board but I am not a PCB repair expert. Good thing there is one on the KLOV forums! Craig Yarbrough (Forum ID: bit_slicer) repaired this for me a couple weeks ago and it works great. He even cleaned up some of the bad traces so well that I couldn’t even tell where they were. Craig is an Atari PCB expert. According to his forum signature he also repairs Centipede, Millipede, Missile Command, Crystal Castles, Liberator, Warlords, Atari Basketball and Atari AR-I and II power pcb’s. I highly recommend his services. Drop him a Private Message via the forums if you also need some repairs done.

Here’s a video of what it was doing before the repair:

Here are some pictures of the final game:

The glass under the Atari logo on the speaker assembly fell out long ago. It is normally held in by the speaker overlay sticker, but that cracked and fell apart. I cleaned it up best I could, and I taped it back on. Eventually I’d like to get a new speaker overlay. Reproductions were done years ago, but they are not available any longer. Going to have to really look for one someday. Hopefully another repro run will be done by then.

Here’s the latest video, this time of my son playing a quick game. Works great!

More news to come on this game. I still have to learn how to play this well. Until then, check out Mark Alpiger’s Crystal Castles Site. He is one of the record holders in the game, and is a real old-school expert player.
I should have a lot more updates over the next few weeks. All of the spring sports are wrapping up. This will give me some time to work on some other games not far from joining the arcade!