The other day I prepared my Atari Jaguar to build a rotary controller for Tempest 2000. I hadn’t used it in a while and accidently picked the wrong power supply – smoke was rising immediately from the console.

The culprit was easily found, chip U38 (MC34163DW):

I haven’t been careful enough during the removal and lifted three solder pads with the chip:

Fixed the upper pads and the trace to the resistor with Kynar wire:

The power problem was fixed, but there was no sound in the games. It seems that this is a common issue as there is no fuse protecting the power regulators. Fixes are being discussed here and here. The capacitor C134 was fine and didn’t need to be replaced, so I focused on the regulator REG1.

No accidents happened this time:

Done! Tempest 2000 is running fine again with sound.

My rotary controller is loosely based on this tutorial. For the first tests I used an Atari 2600 Driving Controller as encoder. It has 4 or 8 PPR (pulses per revolution) only and doesn’t make fun to play with as it moves the ship way too slow.

A better option is a 24 PPR Encoder, e.g. EN16. I went for the configuration EN16-H22AF15 with detents, i.e. it ‘clicks’ on every pulse. The knob of the Atari Driving Controller fits on the plastic shaft:

Be careful to solder the wires to the correct contacts of the ribbon cable (yellow circle), there are at least two different PCB layouts: