Arcade Collecting > Merit/JVL Touchscreen

Megatouch XL upright bootloops every half second; tried new PSU, mobo, and RAM

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DaddyLongLegs:
Hello! A few months back you fine folks walked me through getting my upright Megatouch XL to work. Back then it was the chip on the i/o board that has DOS stored on it (the chip rotted somehow). I bought a new motherboard and I/O board on eBay and after getting help making this thing work with CF instead of CD-ROM, all was well.

That lasted a whopping 3 months or so. I went to put the thing on 2 weeks ago and it will not boot. When I power it on, all I hear is repeated sounds from the speaker that sound like the machine is powering on and off at a very fast rate (seriously it's like every half second).

There were a few times (maybe 4 out of 100?) that I got it to boot. Those rare times I either got an error about missing some driver file (this is from FREEDOS installed to the CF) or I will get really, really lucky and I will see the Megatouch splash screen but it lists zero games and all I can do is see the Megatouch advertisement splash screens for other exciting products.

So I bought a brand new Megatouch power supply. I got it in the mail the other day and finally had time to wire it up today and....same thing! So it is not the power supply, somehow.

I also do not think it is the motherboard because I have two of them and they both give me the same results. Though I did have two I/O boards at one point, unfortunately I gave one away so I only have one to test. Though I can't imagine it's the I/O board since this one looks brand new practically.

List of things I have tried: different sticks of RAM, taking out the CMOS battery, different ribbon cable for the CD-ROM/CF, new power supply, different motherboard, different sticks of RAM, and taking out the riser board and plugging the i/o board directly into the motherboard.

If I take out the i/o board I get no booting either. The only difference is I don't hear the sounds from the speaker when it constantly reboots. I have tried taking out the RAM and leaving the i/o board in and the same thing happens so I don't think it can be the RAM.

I am at a loss trying to think about what else I could possibly do. I can't believe what a nightmare/curse this thing has been to me. I don't think I have ever had this amount of trouble with any piece of tech in my life. Any advice on what to try would be greatly appreciated!

lilshawn:
sounds like it's in overload protection. does the voltage from the power supply jump up and down?

check the riser board. make sure it's plugged in properly and seated all the way down. also try removing the riser and see if it will boot.

double check your power supply voltage (particularly the 5 volt rail (red wires) and make sure they aren't low) even a new power supply can be weird.

when in doubt.. remove everything and power up the board on the bench with just a monitor connected. then slowly add items and see if something causes it to do the bootloop thing.

if just the bare board with nothing plugged in doesn't work... maybe you have bad caps on it causing the overload to trip on the power supply.

obcd:
Same advice here. Try to run the mobo with just a monitor connected. (Without io card and disk and without touchscreen connected.)

It should show you the initial bootup screen and some message that it can't locate a boot device.

It's pretty normal that you don't hear anything with the io card removed.
The sound chip and sound amplifiers are on that io board. The speaker is connected to that board as well.

It's also a sort of behavour you can get when the cmos backup battery is running out. Have you checked the CR2032 on the motherboard? (If you have one) Sometimes those older mobo's use a chip with integrated battery (big square black block)
I checked my spare megatouch xl board and it's having a cr2032 battery.

DaddyLongLegs:
Thanks for the replies. The CMOS battery is definitely fine; I should have mentioned I bought a new one and replaced it. As for the monitor, can I use the Megatouch monitor or does it have to be a different VGA monitor? I am only asking because I have never once in my life got this machine to display an image if the i/o board wasn't plugged in.

obcd:
It might be better to use another monitor in that case. Those old pc's use a 640 x 350 EGA resolution for their boot screen.
The game switches that resolution to 640 x 480. Maybe your original monitor is unable to display the 640 x 350.
When it worked, did you see the boot sequence with text before it shows the megatouch splash screen?
I believe you did as you took several pictures from it during the transfer to compact flash.
In that case, it's strange that it's not showing you anything without the io board. There is nothing essential on that io board that is needed to boot.

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