OMG What have I gotten myself into -- 10 MORE CABS!

[smalltownguy]

Sorry about the lack of updates the past few days....I have a TON of leaves and yardwork that comes up every October, so most of my waking daylight time has been spent on that. I was able to complete a few more things in the past week, though:

• Put the K4900 from my tube swap into the Neo Geo cab, buttoned it up *DONE*
• Cleaned up and rearranged the tools and spare parts all over the garage
• Recapped the audio section of the Donkey Kong boards, to no avail - Kong's pounding sound is STILL missing.
• Got a call from the owner on Wednesday - the Mortal Kombat cab was not working again. No lights, no coin lamps, no monitor, no game. I suspect the line fuse.
• Repaired / diagnosed and fixed / cleaned THREE laptops for a co-worker, a friend, and a relative. Made some nice CA$H.

Last night I stopped by the pizzeria to see if I could figure out what was going on with Mortal Kombat. I pulled the machine out, tested the AC at the line entry, good. Tested the fuse, good. Tested the continuity on any plug/wire/connector I could, all good. DAMMIT! Looks like this one had to come back. I made the decision to pick up the cab in the AM, and drop off the Donkey Kong at the same time.

Now, dropping off the Donkey Kong was a bit of a challenge for me, since it's not 100% working. There's STILL no 'pounding' sound in the game when Kong stomps on the girders. Everything else works, right down to the last detail, EXCEPT that sound. I've reflowed more sections of the board than I care to count, replaced tons of semiconductors, checked, re-checked, and RE-CHECKED every cord, jack, fitting. Nothing. I have a feeling a ROM chip needs replacing. Grrrrrrrr. But, I digress. At this point, I need to just let this go and let the game start making some money again. The owner's customers have been asking about the game, and it's time to get it back to the pizzeria. In all honesty, only a handful of people playing the game will ever really know that the sound is missing, since it only happens only a few times during gameplay. Besides, it's not my pcb, and the owner has told me that $85 to swap boards from Mike's Arcade is not in his best interest. So, that's that. I picked up my free extra large sausage pizza and went home to enjoy some quality time with my 2 girls.

This morning, I ran the Donkey Kong down to the pizzeria and picked up the Mortal Kombat. I'm getting pretty good at wheeling these games around with my new hand truck -- a GREAT tool to have in this hobby, for sure. I unloaded the DK, swapped it in for the Mortal Kombat, and drove away. As I'm pulling out of the parking lot, I look in the rear view mirror to make sure the MK game is riding nicely in the trailer (I'd laid it down on its back), and I spot it: a TEEEENY tiny little hole in the top corner of the cab. ---steaming pile of meadow muffin---, are you kidding me? REALLY? Did I totally miss something obvious?

So I get home, unload the game, plug it in, and flick the little switch I found in the hole. BAM! Mortal Kombat lives again. And cue the image.....





Guess I should have checked for the obvious, eh? Someone must have switched off the game, and no one (myself included) even knew there was a power switch on the cab. I'd never seen it before -- now to my defense, the cab DID have a lot of cobwebs on top, and the hole was partially covered. It's possible that I could have missed it when working on it before. Oh well, at least it's working again, and I get another 1/2 hour added to my tab at the pizzeria

Later today I'll call the owner and ask him to come and get the Mortal Kombat, the Neo Geo, the Head On, and I'll finally be rid of these cabs. Then I can start my Ms Pac Man Restoration. I think before I start that though, I'll take the guts from the Ms Pac (Final Fight) and see if I can build myself a little JAMMA test rig. I've got enough spare parts floating around that it shouldn't be too tough, and it'll be nice to work on monitors on my bench top versus having to move them near my Double Dragon cab to test them.

[BobA]

Very enjoyable, glad to see got a bit of time in on your repairs.  You will soon have the material for a full fledged How To Repair an Arcade Machine blog.   

[shateredsoul]

=( for no pizza for life.. but at the same time.. you'd probably get bored of pizza if it was unlimited.

[smalltownguy]

Ok so tonight I played a bit more with the various parts of my 19K7302 monitors tonight to see if I could put together a working monitor from various pieces. I have a replacement neckboard from Carl Blessing, and I bought a deflection board from bkchang79 over on the KLOV forums. My yoke connector's plug didn't match the pins on the replacement chassis -- must have been a different revision of the 19K7302 board. I was able to splice in the correct one, however. Hooking everything up, this is what I got:



And another shot:



The image is totally bathed in red, and there's scanlines on it. Ajusting the red bias makes minor changes to the red, but the 'red bath' remains. Adjusting the flyback control makes the whole image brighter or darker red, white if I turn it all the way up, and black if I turn it all the way down.

Thoughts folks? Do I have an issue with the neckboard? Do I need to take a look at a transistor?

I don't believe the yoke connection is the issue, since the image is perfect, just tinted red. Hopefully someone here will see this and recognize the symptoms and recommend a course of action.

Some background info: the board has NOT been capped, but was sold to me in a supposed 'working' condition.

[smalltownguy]

Okay, taking pinballjim's advice, I decided to see if swapping the drive transistors would cause the problem to change colors, or stay the same. If I swapped transistors with, say the transistor on the green line, then the problem would migrate to green if the transistor in the red line was bad.

So I swapped them, and plugged it in. Nada. Problem remains. But I did notice one thing. Not sure if it's worth mentioning, but I thought I would put a picture of it up for all to see. The resistors on my other cracked neckboard are all oriented the same way, whereas the resistors on my problem neckboard have one that is reversed. See this pic:



My red tinted neckboard is on the left, and my cracked neckboard is on the right. Notice how the middle resistor on my red tinted neckboard is reversed in relation to the other two resistors above and below it. On my cracked neckboard, they're all mounted the same direction. Is this something I should be concerned about? I'm not sure.

Just for kicks, I took a look at the neckboard in my brand spankin' new 19K7302 in the box. That neck board has one resistor installed opposite the other two as well, but a different one. And I KNOW that monitor works. So maybe it doesn't matter. I don't know.

But since I was already digging inside the box, I figured I'd pull the neckboard off the new monitor and see if it would clear up my issue. My reasoning was that if I used the known working neckboard and the issue went away, then I can be SURE that the problem lies in my red tinted neckboard. Of course I was a bit hesitant to do this. I absolutely HATE taking things apart that work. It's like a recipe for disaster. Against my better judgement, I pulled the neckboard and installed it on my suspect chassis.

Here's what I got:





Well, that pretty much clears THAT up. It's DEFINITELY a problem with my neckboard. So now what? It's not the transistor, because I swapped the red with the green, and the red tint remains. What's my next course of action?

[BurgerKingDiamond]

I'm not an electronics expert, but I believe that resistors have no polarity, as opposed to LED's for example. In other words they can be installed either way.

[smalltownguy]

After wrestling with several concerns about transistors, resistors, and studying the neckboard I'm working with here, I decided that this neckboard is not compatible with this revision of this main board for this 19K7302. The schematics don't match, and the foil side of the neckboard doesn't match either.

I decided to turn my attention to the cracked neckboard, to see if I could repair it. I mean really... all I need to do is figure out where I have broken traces, and re-connect the dots, right?

Here's the end result of my 'brain surgery.'



Well, you never know -- this just might work!

Plugged it in and...










Hell Yeah! One more monitor saved from the scrap heap!!

[eds1275]

I think you need to have a post now and then mentioning how much weight you're gaining eating all this pizza

Good job on fixing these beasts!

[smalltownguy]

I think you need to have a post now and then mentioning how much weight you're gaining eating all this pizza

Good job on fixing these beasts!

Haha! Actually, I don't really eat that much pizza -- most of the time I've ordered so far, it's been for a house full of people and I've only had a few pieces myself. All good things in moderation you know ... 

Thanks for the compliments! I think I'm actually going to try and tackle the Head On cab now, since I'm running out of things to do 

[Malenko]

thats pretty good soldering, its hilarious looking but as long as it works! 

[smalltownguy]

The spinner stopped working on the Arkanoid II game today. When I arrived on site, I powered down the game and powered back up again, and I could get the ship to wiggle when I turned the spinner, but it wouldn't move. After work, I stopped by again and powered up the game (after it had been off for several hours) and the spinner worked again. 5 minutes later it stopped working. Ship just wiggled. Powered down and up again, and now the ship is still.

I looked over the optic PCB, and the solder appears good. Wheels spin fine, gears are all good and greased. I suspect a board issue.

Found this thread about a bad IC on the board causing the spinner input to crash. Luckily, my friend has an arkanoid cab that I can test this board in, so tomorrow I'll test the board to see if it works in his cab or not. If it does (for more than 30 minutes), then I know my problem lies with the spinner.

Also, on a side note: this board seems to NOT like anything less than 5.3 volts on the 5v line. When I dial the power supply voltage back to 5 volts, the board won't power up. At 5.2, it will power up, but it wont coin up. It has to be fed about 5.4 volts to remain stable. Is this too high? Could this have caused my issue with the spinner?

Of course it could be something as simple as re-seating the JAMMA connector. I guess I should try that, eh?

In other news, the Neo Geo cabinet is now on location!! I spent a few hours with it today getting it route ready. The coin mechs weren't working, but that turned out to be a missing ground wire. Player one 'up' was also not working, but that fixed itself when I re-seated the JAMMA connector. Special thanks to Ross (rmackie6661) for the Wells Gardner K4900 monitor -- I swapped the tubes on it and she's beeeeeeautiful! This cab was given to me at first as a 'parts' cab, as nothing on it worked. Now it's at the pizzeria, making some money!

On a more sad note, the Mortal Kombat cab has now been moved into my basement. It's still rebooting, and now the monitor won't turn on either. The image on the G07's screen was beginning to shrink vertially, so I knew it was a matter of time before it went. Looks like it's time to recap it. My buddy has a MK cab, and I'll be testing his boards in this Dynamo cab to see if it will work.

So 2 down, and 1 back up. Hopefully this Arkanoid II issue is minor.

[smalltownguy]

Ok, so I pulled the G07 out of the Mortal Kombat cab today. Nothing, nada. I have a feeling I'm going to have to get a 'get well' kit from Bob Roberts soon with a cap kit, flyback, HOT, and other goodies to get her alive again. In the mean time, I put my recently resurrected 19k7302 on the Mortal Kombat to see how it would look. It's been on for over 15 hours and it's running just fine.

I'm beginning to think that as the G07's flyback was beginning to fail, it was drawing extra power at times causing the board to reboot. I just can't think of any other reason why this game would be running fine on a new monitor, but not on the old one.

Anyone else see a failing flyback manifest itself in other game performance concerns?

[smalltownguy]

This past weekend I placed the Mortal Kombat machine back on location with a new monitor, the repaired 19K7302 that I sucesfully fixed the neck board on. Sunday night I get a text from the owner that the machine is still wigging out and rebooting. WTF???

I ran the machine for 48 hours straight in my shop with multiple play sessions and it never hiccuped even ONCE. There has GOT to be a starved power issue going on with the hallway outside the pizza joint. There are 6 cabs plugged into a single receptacle, using a simple plug extender. I'm thinking we either need to get a few power strips going, or move the MK cab to it's own power supply.

My buddy has an MK cab that he's willing to donate to the cause. If I can get that one to stay running reliably, then we'll sell the other MK cab to a private party for home use.

In other news, I brought the Arkanoid II cab into my workshop for testing yesterday. After 3 extended play sessions last night and another this morning, the only blip I saw was a board reset. Checked the 5v line and it was low at 4.9 under load. I cranked it up a bit and no issues since then.

I have requested that my wife play several sessions on the cab today to see if we can replicate the 'ship not moving' problem that was going on when the machine was on route. So far so good. Imagine my wife's chagrin when I told her it was her JOB to play the cab multiple times over the next few days. I'm sure she's very sad about that.

It seems that the problem may have been as simple as re-seating the JAMMA connector again. Back on page 1 of this thread, you'll read that the original problem with this game was a loose JAMMA connector. If I continue to have problems, I may have to cut this connector off and replace it with a new one. In the mean time I'll clean up the contacts as best I can and make sure that once placed on route, no one moves the cab around much. It seems that they re-arranged the cab lineup a few times in the hallway outside the pizza parlor, and I'm thinking the jiggling around is knocking the JAMMA connector loose.

Since this is cab #8, and the owner only has room for 7 cabs in the hallway, this one gets to stay in my basement arcade for a few weeks/months/years until further notice 
 

[Funnel]

Kudos to smalltownguy for having a lot of patience dealing with those beasts! Hey take some pictures of the cabs in the pizza hallway.

[smalltownguy]

I'll do ya one better -- I'll shoot a quick video. I have to stop by there tonight to snap some pics of the Mortal Kombat to sell it, so I'll bring the video cam.

Thanks for the kind words!

This project's not done yet - I'm going to tear into that Head On cab and get it working. Why? Because I can. 

[HaRuMaN]

Head On

Apply directly to the forehead.

[Rick]

Apply directly to the forehead.

Fix'd.

 

[JustMichael]

Apply directly to the forehead.

Fix'd.

 

ROTFLMAO!!!!!

[smalltownguy]

Heheh....you guys are too much.

As promised, here's a quick tour of the games at the pizzeria!

[Rick]

As promised, here's a quick tour of the games at the pizzeria!

That's more of an arcade than I've seen in years.  That's an amazing venue.  How much play do these games get?

[Funnel]

Dude that really is an amazing hall. You must feel really proud by fixing these machines.

[yotsuya]

That's pretty neat. Does he have a Skee Ball machine anywhere? It's not the same without taking the kids to cash in pizza-stained tickets!

[VanillaGorilla]

You're not far from sheboygan, I got a cousin up there. Might have to plan a trip up from chicago

[Rick]

Might have to plan a trip up from chicago

He DID offer free pizza.  I say "ROAD TRIP!"

 

[VanillaGorilla]

Are we talking about a caravan up from chicago? Pizza and arcade games? I'm getting too old to let such an opportunity pass me by. I have to grab as many chances to regress into my 13 year old self as possible. My fiance would think otherwise, but she can stay home

[jennifer]

      Me too, Oh yes me..me.. I want to go too!!!!!

[smalltownguy]

Hotel in town is cheap - $40 a night.

Minneapolis / St Paul is 40 minutes West.

Folks, you make your way up, and I'll give you all the free pizza you can eat. I still have over $700 in credit at the store, and it will be YEARS before I can use it all up.

After we've had enough fun at the 'Pizzacade, we can retreat to my basement arcade for some Area51 and other Aim Track goodness on my MAME cab. Beer's on me. (or liquor, if you prefer)

Cheap stay -- Free food, free booze, cheap classic arcade games, and good times. Can you really afford to pass it up?

 

[HaRuMaN]

we can retreat to my basement

[smalltownguy]

Trap? In MY basement? The only trap in my basement is a lint trap in the dryer. Or maybe the fish trap for ice fishing.

heheheh

[Rick]

heheheh

Why do I picture you wringing your hands when I read this?

 

[DirtyDachshunds]

Hotel in town is cheap - $40 a night.

Minneapolis / St Paul is 40 minutes West.

Folks, you make your way up, and I'll give you all the free pizza you can eat. I still have over $700 in credit at the store, and it will be YEARS before I can use it all up.

After we've had enough fun at the 'Pizzacade, we can retreat to my basement arcade for some Area51 and other Aim Track goodness on my MAME cab. Beer's on me. (or liquor, if you prefer)

Cheap stay -- Free food, free booze, cheap classic arcade games, and good times. Can you really afford to pass it up?

 

Pizza, beer, and arcade goodness is my kind of party.  I'd make the trip, especially if we could find a few other guys to come.

[smalltownguy]

Pizza, beer, and arcade goodness is my kind of party.  I'd make the trip, especially if we could find a few other guys to come.

You won't set FOOT in my house until you remove that avatar.

J/K

[DirtyDachshunds]

Pizza, beer, and arcade goodness is my kind of party.  I'd make the trip, especially if we could find a few other guys to come.

You won't set FOOT in my house until you remove that avatar.

J/K

Deal!

[flashiv]

I'll be watching this thread for possible dates as I am only about 1 1/2 hours west of Sheboygan.

You have to watch those lint traps, they are dangerous!   

[yotsuya]

I'm jealous. I'm all the way out in Phoenix, AZ.

[EvilNuff]

...Minneapolis / St Paul is 40 minutes West....

I was just in Msp this weekend and now you tell me! 

[Ond]

Can I hang out with you guys at the Pizzacade too?   

[smalltownguy]

Can I hang out with you guys at the Pizzacade too?   

Ond, the price of admission for you is a significant update on your project thread.

[HaRuMaN]

I'm jealous. I'm all the way out in Phoenix, AZ.

Hey, me too!

[yotsuya]

I'm jealous. I'm all the way out in Phoenix, AZ.

Hey, me too!

We can have our own pizza party!