How does this sound as a group project??? (Longish)

From: Paul Sommers <Paul.Sommers_at_cwo.com.au>
Date: Tue May 16 2000 - 20:38:29 EDT

<x-html>
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN">
<HTML>
<HEAD>
<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=windows-1252">
<META NAME="Generator" CONTENT="MS Exchange Server version 5.5.2651.75">
<TITLE>How does this sound as a group project??? (Longish)</TITLE>
</HEAD>
<BODY>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Gang,</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Last night someone dropped off a Stargate boardset for me to have a go a repairing. As I don't really know what I'm doing I always set their expectations that they may get it back still broken.</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">I sat down with the info from Dave Langley's website (in particular The Ranger Chronicles) and within an hour had fixed the boardset.</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">That type of repair makes my week - especially when you consider I knew nothing about electronics when I started this just over 2 years ago.</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Feeling pretty good I turned back to my Berzerk, and now the moving garbage I had when I powered down last night has gone back to static garbage.</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">I poked and prodded for a while using the Duck Hunting method (shoot at anything that moves - you're bound to hit something) and realised quickly I was completely lost.</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Took a break and it really hit me what my particular problem was - and maybe other people are experiencing this, although I realise there is an awful high level of expertise on this list.</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">While the books I read can teach me what a NAND gate is, and Kev has written an excellent Logic Probe FAQ, and there is a ton of help out there (you guys have no idea how many games you have brought back to life in Australia)...</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">I don't have a troubleshooting methodology.</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Or at least it stops at a certain point (check voltages &amp; connections, reseat chips, verify roms).</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">I thought it might be a good resource (and I volunteer to collate and put it all together as I can offer little technical skills and would benefit greatly) if we all contribute to a methodology for newbies or the inexperienced.</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">So after the obvious above - where do you go next? The CPU? What should you be looking for? Should you see different signals on different CPU's?</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">This should be very generic but we can concentrate on maybe Z80, 6502, 6809...</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Then maybe we could move onto the ROMS - how to check the roms are functioning correctly...</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Or maybe someone has this in a book specific to videogame troubleshooting and we don't do this at all. Or maybe we should move this to RGVAC?</FONT></P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Your thoughts?</FONT>
</P>

<P><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Cheers</FONT>
<BR><FONT COLOR="#0000FF" FACE="Arial">Paul</FONT>
</P>
<BR>

</BODY>
</HTML>
</x-html>
Received on Tue May 16 23:05:05 2000

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Tue Dec 02 2003 - 17:28:56 EST