Re: Asteroids Deluxe Repair Story

I did the same exact thing with my Battlezone.

The screens were mostly correct but every now and then on the attaction
sequence the vectors would jumble and jump around and then after a few
seconds everything would be fine.

I dragged out my scope, logic probe, multimeter, and schematics and went to
work attempting to find the problem on the AUX board. It just HAD to be a
logic problem, I thought.

After several hours of verifying traces and outputs to the best of my
ability with no luck, I accidently bumped my arm against one of the PROMS
on the front edge of the AUX board. My scope was then displaying a correct
attraction sequence! It couldn't have been that easy; I did try that first
a few days ago - didn't I?

I wiggled the chip during the attraction sequence, and sure enough, bad
socket. Sometimes in my haste to really dig down and find component-level
flaws I overlook the real simple problems that age and environment create.

        - Matt

At 09:02 AM 1/21/00 -0500, you wrote:
>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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Why should I worry about Windows crashing on January 1st? Mine crashes
every day...

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Received on Fri Jan 21 08:47:50 2000