DMD decides to crap out 2 hours before family arrives for holiday - grrrrr

[arzoo]

I spend weeks getting my Demolition Man working perfectly for when our family stays over for the holiday and two hours before they all arrive the display starts to flake out.

Basically there are bunches of extra pixels randomly lighting up - usually in vertical lines spaced evenly across the panel. Most all the graphics are messed up but a few are fine. When I run a display test - same thing happens, random pixels and vertical lines. Plus, the test indicates some sort of page error (but it's hard to tell because the text is all messed up).

I have no idea if the display is going bad or the DMD controller board or RAM or something else. Any suggestions on how to diagnose this?

Thanks

[Ken Layton]

If you have a page error, then the large ram chip on the DMD control/power supply board is bad.

[arzoo]

I took a long shot and reseated the data cables to and from the DMD controller and to my surprise, the problem was resolved  . This of course makes no sense - it definitely seemed like a logic error, so I just don't see how a bad connection on a ribbon cable could be the cause. But I guess the turkey gods were shining down.

[Nephasth]

In fact, I've said for years that 90% of your pinball problems are a connector, 10% are the power supply, and 5% are something weird.

Jim, if you've got 105% of problems, you've got too many damn problems!