Jolt Country

Unfortunately when working on arcade games, working on them "hot" is the only way to do it. Traditional tools like multimeters and solder suckers don't work on these things. Everybody just plugs them in and starts probing with their tongues, looking for short circuits and hoping not to get killed. If that doesn't work sometimes you can just spray water on the board with it plugged in and look for the sparks. When all else fails you can just hook everything to a few daisy chained batteries and then watch for where the fire starts.

More techs have died from tongue burns when diagnosing boards..... Isnt that why they called that one a ' suicide board'? Because so many disgruntled arcade techs have checked themselves out that way?


THE
GOODBYE CRUEL WORLD
AARDVARK

Does shoving toothpicks into a screaming flyback while it's on to try make it stfu count? I wish I was joking.

Jizaboz wrote:Does shoving toothpicks into a screaming flyback while it's on to try make it stfu count? I wish I was joking.

Haha, who did that with a toothpick?

I am linking this, because this helps a newb understand what it means for a transistor to be shorted to the metal cage:

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/archive ... 77043.html

The thing I noticed was that I had the transistors connected, and then their wires going to the deflection board. I was seeing a short on ONE of them. Well, you have to unplug the connectors and then test.

I got a little farther tonight, in so much as I have graphics in the lower-right corner of the game. Nnnngh. I had a wire come loose from one of the transistors, though. I corrected that and then came upstairs to read about the "testing a transistor for a short" thing.

Argh, so it's been a week and a half since I really decided to get all my arcade problems solved. A local company said that if I dropped Tempest's monitor off they'd look at it.

Even the people that have responded to me initially on craigslist stopped responding when I described the problems I've had.

Some of this is because I think guys who do this don't work with email or texts. But at the same time, the number of available techs, at least in Denver, is drying up.

I've got to think about the games I have and if they are gonna be too problematic to keep around or what. The three most troublesome games were Tempest, Zoo Keeper and Q*bert. Q*bert's been great since I put a jrok board in it, haha. The other two are down.

There is great Tempest news! A guy came to look at it today. He grabbed the monitor -- I can't believe how easy the monitor comes out. I maybe should take it out when I work on it myself. :(

It took five months -- and the guy apologize profusely -- but Tempest's monitor has been repaired and it works 100%.

I shall start another thread about the guy who grabbed the 13" monitor in my JAMMA cab and my Mr. Do! board (to put a ZIF socket in) and it's now been 6 months and the guy has promised over and over again to drop it off and has stopped responding to texts.

THAT guy is a piece of shit.