Zaxxon

Using your on-screen altimeter, you control your ship with an aircraft-style joystick, barnstorming your way through wall openings, under electronic barriers, dodging rockets and in a later round, dueling with the ominous enemy robot. Your ship gains fuel by destroying the fuel tanks. A successful attack-run across Zaxxon leads you to a deep-space dogfight with enemy planes. A "cross-hair" appears indicating when an incoming plane is able to be hit by your laser. After a specified number of ships have been destroyed, the robot appears. To destroy the robot, you must hit it's missile launcher six times, after which the round changes and the difficulty increases.

The game is much harder than it appears. If you hover over the asteroid city and do nothing, Zaxxon will shoot a homing missle at you. Enemy missles will create turbulence which will lower your altitude and shake your plane.

The attract mode does an excellent job of showing how the game is played.

Use the altimeter well since it is a very important part of this game. Shoot the red cylindrical fuel tanks to replenish your fuel. There are also two fuel tanks that fly by in space. Both can be shot if your altitude is one mark below the top.

If you destroy 20 planes in a single round, you will get a bonus of 1,000 points. Planes on the ground also count. In space, the best altitude is about 2 to 2.5 marks from the bottom. When you are in line with an enemy plane, a cross hairs will show up along with a beeping sound.

Hit as many radar towers as possible, they are worth 1,000 points each but usually located in dangerous areas (if you drop down and right immediately after you enter the first asteroid, you can always get that first one on the right).

To get past the electronic barriers or through the holes in the walls, align yourself approximately with the hole and start firing, if/when your shots go through without hitting anything then you are aligned and can fly through safely.

If you fly too high for too long (except in space), Zaxxon will fire a homing missile at you. While possible to destroy it, it's very difficult to do so and you are better off trying to escape by flying below it.

Zaxxon (the robot) can be destroyed with six well placed shots on his missile before he launches it. Fly at an altitude of 2.5 marks from the bottom. Position yourself so the nose of your plane is pointing between the second and third hexagon on the ground (see last screenshot on this page for approximate position). If you fire fast enough, you can take out Zaxxon before it has a chance to even try and avoid you. Destroying Zaxxon gives you a whoppin' 1,000 point bonus. If it manages to launch the missile, you can still destroy the missile, but that will only give you 200 points.

The guns are worth 200 to 500 points randomly. The planes are worth 100 with an additional 50 points per level tacked on after level 2. Radar Towers are worth 1,000 points. Zaxxon is worth 1,000 points.

In the game, Zaxxon is the name of the enemy robot who you must destroy.Milton Bradley turned this and other Sega titles into board games. "Can You Complete Your Mission Before Zaxxon Zaps You?"

The full-size stand up version uses a really nice metal flight stick with a trigger and an LED on top. The cocktail version uses a standard WICO-style ball joystick.

The game shares a common pinout with three other games: Congo Bongo, Super Zaxxon and Future Spy. These last two games are conversions that use an original Zaxxon boardset, but require added daughter cards or custom globs and hacks besides the usual ROM swaps. Also, Future Spy requires a second button for bombing.

The two-PCB set is huge and filled with simple components.

On dedicated machines the crude Zaxxon logo may be mildly burnt into the screen as well as the score info and the Sega 1982 in the bottom right corner.

This game is notorious for having some sounds fade out after a couple minutes (most notably the flying sounds and the explosions). This is a simple fix. Replace all 2.2uF 50v capacitors on the sound portion of the board with cheapo polarized equivalents. There are 13 total and are: C28, C29, C32, C38, C41, C55, C59, C68, C69, C74, C76, C80 and C93. They are labeled clearly on the board so they should be easy to find. Be sure to install the caps properly, however (again, polarity is marked on the board too).

Also see: http://home.san.rr.com/rbarnes/Arcade/fix.txt for an alternate fix.