RE: Messed up my Black Widow

From: Matt J. McCullar <mccullar_at_flash.net>
Date: Wed Jul 04 2012 - 18:29:38 EDT

Sorry it took me so long to respond to this, John! I've run across similar
problems and I think there's a long metal leg of a socket, a bypass
capacitor, or a soldered-in chip that's making intermittent contact with an
adjacent trace. Sometimes Atari didn't cut the leads flush on the solder
side of the board.

My guess is that you had this motherboard on a hard, flat surface when you
were swapping out chips. Therein lies the problem: pushing down on the
board made one or more long leads fold over. Your report on this short
disappearing when you flex the board makes me think you can likely cure this
problem by taking a small pair of wire cutters and trimming off each and
every long lead on the solder-side of the board. This includes bypass
capacitors and empty sockets. Yes, this will take a few minutes, but you
can trim about three at a time and you'll very like discover the culprit in
the process. Do the entire board and you'll probably not have this problem
again.

Hope this helps,

Matt J. McCullar
Fort Worth, TX

  -----Original Message-----
  From: owner-vectorlist@vectorlist.org
[mailto:owner-vectorlist@vectorlist.org]On Behalf Of John Huie
  Sent: Wednesday, July 04, 2012 12:16 AM
  To: vectorlist@vectorlist.org
  Subject: Re: VECTOR: Messed up my Black Widow

        Very strange....on the back of the board there was foam stuck to it
from the piece that goes in there to protect it from bumping against the
cabinet. Cleaned the residue off and then checked the +5/Ground again and
it was no longer shorted. Got about the same resistance as the other board.
Weird but cool I thought.

        Took it back out and checked it again to be sure and yep, seemed
fine. Plugged it into the game and still had no LED though. Errrrrr.
Pulled the board out and grabbed my meter....it's shorted again.

        Sigh.

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Received on Wed Jul 4 18:17:12 2012

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