Re: Audio Reg II board smoking?

You wrote:
> G'day folks (and Ray),

Not sure how I'm supposed to take this ;-)

> However, when I swapped back in the Asteroids board, R30, on the Audio
> Reg II started smoking! (Retesting with the Asteroids Deluxe board and
> the smoked Audio Reg II showed that there was no damage.)
> Unfortunately, I didn't have any schematics to Asteroids Deluxe or
> Tempest available at the time. Any guesses why I'd see this behavior?

Like Duncan, I don't have the schematics memorized, however, everytime I've
seen resistors on A/R boards glow, it was because of a crappy connection at the
edge connector. Like Duncan said, the board goes nuts trying to drive 5V and
blows itself out.

Make sure you have good connections at the A/R board, the pins of the edge
connector (they tend to fry on Atari games), and the edge connector of the PCB
is clean. Ideally, all your Atari vector games should have the 5V and +sense
lines on the wiring harness shorted to one another (I learned this lesson from
Rick Schieve). That way, if you have bad contact at the sense or 5V contact,
you don't fry your A/R board or game PCB as the game tries to compensate.
Instead, the game doesn't work or goes flakey. That is a good sign that you
need to clean the contacts on the connector.

Hope this helps

Ray
Received on Thu Jan 8 15:06:31 1998