Asteroids Deluxe Repair Story

I had some free time last night as the boy fell asleep a little early, so I decided to take a crack at fixing my AD. It would flash the start buttons really fast and not do anything else.

I figured this time I was prepared. I had my xy scope, my logic probe, my multi-meter, my laptop connected to the Internet, and the schematics sitting right next to me. I spent a long time verifying every pin on the CPU, traced through the watchdog circuit, looked up some spec sheets on the net and so on for a while and felt like I was finally putting the pieces together on how to fix a pcb. It felt pretty good since I'm still trying to learn how to do this (usually I get someone on the phone to help walk me through it).

As I'm in the middle of checking all this stuff, I realized that I never cleaned the edge connector or the pins on the socketed chips.. DOH! That fixed it right up.. I felt as stupid as that guy who missed the $100 question on Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Maybe I should just make a checklist for future projects... I was just so excited to do "real" board repair, I forgot the simple stuff... Oh well... I'm guessing I'm not the first to do this :)

Jon

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Received on Fri Jan 21 06:20:07 2000