Build Your Own Arcade Controls Forum
Main => Main Forum => Topic started by: Oni2382 on June 24, 2009, 03:32:29 pm
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Brought an NFL Blitz game the other day and the Game played for 4 minutes before resetting. It powers up, makes the signiture ding sound all midway games do when they check eeproms, but all i get is a black screen. It's nothing wrong with the cabinet, I swapped out several boards and they all work without issue. How can I tell if the board is bad, or if it's the hard drive? Thanks for any help.
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Bad power supply?
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Bad power supply?
Nah I don't think thats it. I put UMK3 in there and it played flawlessly for hours.
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I have the same exact problem. From what I have read it seems to be a bad hard drive. Have you tried replacing the hard drive? I'm going to try and replace mine and see what happens. Any other suggestions?
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There's a set of power up tests you can enable. I think it's DIP8 on one of the banks. Info is in the manual. Turn all those on, and see if you get any info. Everybody seems to disable them because they take a minute or so to run when the machine is first powered up, but they provide useful info. On Seattle (the single board variety), one of these tests is a "Hard Drive" test. If it fails, the drive is definitely bad. If it passes, the drive is often at least good enough to boot the game, but that doesn't guarantee that it's good.
However, if you get to the "ding" sound, that should mean that the program has been loaded from the hard drive. The ding happens right before it enters the attract loop. In any case, I' believe that, even if power-up tests are disabled, there is text on the screen during that portion of the boot sequence (I think it says "Sound Tone Status: Good").
Does the game appear to be running blind? Can you coin it up and start a game? Does the hard drive activity light (near the hard drive ribbon connector on the PCB) light up periodically? Is the game stuck in a reset loop (all three of the "stoplight" LEDs will momentarily light up as it reboots if it gets bit by the watchdog)?
Hard drive failure is the most common failure on these things, but other stuff does occasionally happen.