After Burner Climax terrain 'spikes' - WTF?

[BPzeBanshee]

I'll get some videos on YouTube (they're phone videos so crap) up at some stage, but I was out and about today and playing on an After Burner Climax cabinet.

It seemed fine at first until it became apparent that the game was rendering weird lines of sorts within the game. It's not like the ones you get when your graphics card carks it, more like you're playing with a 3D terrain generator and decide to make a giant spike in upwards (or some cases here sidewards) direction. It got so bad that after Stage 4 a big spike appeared on the model of the player plane itself. Usually it was only on the terrain though, and did not register as a collision if you ran into one.

So I'm not exactly very smart with hardware but is this just having a wonky/overheating GPU or something specific? Anyone else heard of weird crap like this?

[Ed Oscuro]

It does sound like the system's on its way out. I've seen weird artifacts around scaled graphics on a Simpsons (Konami) arcade cabinet, in a somewhat case. Could be something new caps or even just cleaning would fix, but then again it might not.

Or it might even just need to be reset. I don't know how the software on ABC works; I've seen my share of odd graphical glitches (some rather similar to what you mention) on the PC, usually in games that are losing data point precision over a period of time, i.e., shit programming. I kinda doubt that would be as likely on the ABC machine though. With complex 3D hardware, there's probably lots of opportunities for malfunctioning bits to screw with the rendering system over time.

[BPzeBanshee]

Well I know After Burner Climax is on the so-called 'Lindbergh' cabinets but other than that I don't know a hell of a lot. Definitely never seen it on the 360 port. The cabinet's taken a lot of flak from the aboriginals here and the sensor used to get triggered off like every second day so it could be that it's been smacked once too many times.

That being said it seemed fine recently, every time I've seen it at the cinemas it's been working and I thought it'd been replaced. Maybe the security guards finally caught on to the early morning kids or something.

[Op Intensify]

This must be a common Lindbergh problem. I've seen the exact same thing on the local arcade's Let's Go Jungle cab, another Lindbergh game. Everyone had a 10-foot-long nose and gigantic elbows in the cutscenes, it was hilarious.

They were thankfully able to fix it.