Lodi, CA
As someone who worked on all of them, (eventually), and attended Atari Service Schools at the factory, (I was only an hour south of there), I can tell you a few things about them.
The first question is Superman is the best production game, hands down. It had conventional flippers and Steve Ritchie flow. It had the Phase 2 board set with memory. It had LED displays and not plasma style. Some of the metals were a grade up from the earlier games. I did like the non matrix switch inputs.
Second the best of the non production games was Road Runner. There were two at Atari during one of the weeks I was there. One had the Phase 3 board set. That board set had a serial output feature. You cannot use that board in Superman or Hercules. Next is Nutron Star. That was going to be a pretty good game. The code needed revision but it played completely. I worked on the boards for it when Dan Kramer owned it.
Hercules. What can you say. It was a piece of work. Bombay doors to work on the bottom of the playfield. You basically laid on the floor working on it above you. The blood runs out of your arms pretty quickly. 120 volt Guardian solenoids for activating flippers and pop bumpers. Used a pool ball for game play. (Tip, works better if you can find the lighter pool ball and not the regulation one). Those solenoids are slow reacting if not aligned perfectly. Boards in the back box as with Superman. Has the extra interface board for the 120 volt coils. On that game things just fell apart.
The others. Pretty much the same. Middle Earth was OK and Space Riders was the best game of those that was on route. Those Ledex motors on many were as disaster. Those were made by a company not far from the Atari factory. The display was always dying. The board was mounted to the bottom of the cabinet and every loose screw fell on it. No memory. Strange switch input circuitry. The board was designed by the video side of the house so they used that style of operation. You need the Atari Book to fully understand what they were doing. Sound was OK for the time.
On the production line I saw a lot of stuff on the floor. The line people would get frustrated with bad parts and just throw them all over the place. The music in there was loud and pretty good!
