Fixt. Please Delete.

[WunderCade]

This project is listed over on the PA string, but I ran into a tech problem so I thought I'd ask it here.

I bought this Ms. Pac cabinet for 100.00 and the guy said it just needs a new monitor. I tested it, he was wrong the monitor works.

So I moved to the Ms. Pac board for troubleshooting:

I put my Pac-man board from my working Pac cab into the Ms.Pac machine (the board is modified to play Ms. Pac) and while the game didn't come up normal, the monitor was working and had a solid screen of random letters and numbers like you see for rom errors.

I also swapped and put the Ms. Pac board that came in the Ms. Pac cab into my Pac-man cab since I know that monitor is good. Nothing. No picture at all. So it appears the issue is with Ms. Pac board.

Sidenote: I'm still scratching my head at why my working Pac-man board (altered to Ms.Pac) works just fine in my Pac-man cab, but comes up with screen errors plugged into my Ms. Pac-man cab?? I'm not very knowledgeable on boards but I thought Ms.Pac and Pac boards were interchangeable.  Guess I was wrong. Maybe it's a wiring harness incompatibility, dunno?

Since the monitor works, I moved to the Ms. Pac-man board that came with it. Again, I know squat about the electronics involved but in looking at the board I found one area on it that may be the problem, see photo below with arrows.




In looking at my identical Pac board in my Pac cab. That red terminal has a top over it with a red "reset" button on it. On the (pictured) MS. Pac board that came in the cab - that it is obviously missing.

So my questions are:

1. Could that incomplete terminal cause the board not to operate?

2. If yes, then how do I go about getting that piece replaced?

The missing piece didn't fall off onto the bottom of the cab, I checked there.

3. That red terminal appears to have four posts, can I just jumper them together? Would that work?

Thanks,
Donnie.

[RayB]

Stop what you're doing and go buy a multimeter (volt meter).
You CAN'T troubleshoot without know what voltages you're getting.

[WunderCade]

Stop what you're doing and go buy a multimeter (volt meter).
You CAN'T troubleshoot without know what voltages you're getting.

I bought one, it's still in the package as I haven't a clue how to use it. It has different modes on it for testing different things.

If my best bet is to pay to simply send in the board for a working one, I'll do it. I was just hoping there was a quick obvious fix here. And that spot in the pic seemed to be the only visual discrepancy.

But if the voltage testing is pretty straight forward, I could give it try, which part(s) of the board should I test and for what voltage?