Oh no! Burned-up edge pins!
Well, the least reliable game in my collection is now under fire. It won't fire up.
I've got burned pins on +5 Return, according to the pinouts here: http://www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/spie ... astles.txt
But the sense lines must have sened something to make it burn in the first place. Shitty pins on the edge connector? Certainly a possibility! I am pretty sure the board is fine, because I am not seeing +5 come into the board where +5 should be.
The new Crystal Castles cocktail thread
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Ice Cream Jonsey
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The new Crystal Castles cocktail thread
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!
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Ice Cream Jonsey
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That has been the major benefit. I could not have spelled +5 three years ago.
It's funny - I hated work at AMD because my old manager left when we were purchased and the new guys were going to make me a technishern god dammit, because that's where they needed people, regardless of the fact that I had been programming for the last five years. I didn't know anything about motherboards except what you got from working on PCs all your life. I hated that shit. Now, while I would never go out and get a job doing this stuff (because, even though I joke about Java, I still love programming more than anything else I could do and get paid for) at least it makes more sense.
CC is now working again, here's what happened for future reference:
- The pins on the edge connector were not making good contact with the PCB.
- This causes the "sense" lines on edge connector, which I guess are unique to Atari, to say, "GIMME MORE VOLTAGE!"
- This causes burning of the PCB and all sorts of other odd shit.
What I needed to do was get a closer, tighter, more snatch-like grip of the pins on the edge connector, so they really made hot and sexy contact of the PCB. I did this on the advice of a guy from KLOV (the Killer List of Video Games forum, or as I refer to it around the house, "the arcade bbs"): using a toothpick, I pushed the wires firmly into the edge connector's pins. This moves everything down and makes the grip tighter.
Well, after doing this, I wasn't getting the game to start up. CC has something called an Audio Regulator board. I had no idea. I checked voltages there and it was dead, too. This got me thinking that maybe I had blown a fuse.
I checked all the fuses and sure enough, one was dead. Where the other ones read a nice, "0.000" on my ghettometer (the ghetto multimeter) the bad fuse read like 10.342 or whatever.
The fuse that died was a 20 amp, 32 volt fuse. I had some 20 amp, 250 volt fuses that I grabbed when I launched Mr. Do! down the stairs badly and broke the fuck out of it. You can have a fuse rated for a lower amperage and higher voltage (but not the reverse) so I slid it in.
Voila! It came up and has been running great for the last few hours.
There's two other things I'd like to do to further restore Crystal Castles:
1) Put new control panel art on it. A guy has been selling "mini" control panel overlays for years. Well, there is no fucking mini. It was the cocktail version of the control panel overlay the whole time. Now I just need to find it again and buy two of them.
2) Fix some wood damage I created moving the game into the bedroom of the apartment, back when we lived there. It destroyed the t-molding on the Player Two side. I've taken that off, and I know I can get new t-molding from www.t-molding.com of all places. (Maybe I'll go white. I think that would look nice.) But the wood damage can be fixed by wicking some wood hardener in there. A Tron restoration I saw recently showed me how that was an option.
It's funny - I hated work at AMD because my old manager left when we were purchased and the new guys were going to make me a technishern god dammit, because that's where they needed people, regardless of the fact that I had been programming for the last five years. I didn't know anything about motherboards except what you got from working on PCs all your life. I hated that shit. Now, while I would never go out and get a job doing this stuff (because, even though I joke about Java, I still love programming more than anything else I could do and get paid for) at least it makes more sense.
CC is now working again, here's what happened for future reference:
- The pins on the edge connector were not making good contact with the PCB.
- This causes the "sense" lines on edge connector, which I guess are unique to Atari, to say, "GIMME MORE VOLTAGE!"
- This causes burning of the PCB and all sorts of other odd shit.
What I needed to do was get a closer, tighter, more snatch-like grip of the pins on the edge connector, so they really made hot and sexy contact of the PCB. I did this on the advice of a guy from KLOV (the Killer List of Video Games forum, or as I refer to it around the house, "the arcade bbs"): using a toothpick, I pushed the wires firmly into the edge connector's pins. This moves everything down and makes the grip tighter.
Well, after doing this, I wasn't getting the game to start up. CC has something called an Audio Regulator board. I had no idea. I checked voltages there and it was dead, too. This got me thinking that maybe I had blown a fuse.
I checked all the fuses and sure enough, one was dead. Where the other ones read a nice, "0.000" on my ghettometer (the ghetto multimeter) the bad fuse read like 10.342 or whatever.
The fuse that died was a 20 amp, 32 volt fuse. I had some 20 amp, 250 volt fuses that I grabbed when I launched Mr. Do! down the stairs badly and broke the fuck out of it. You can have a fuse rated for a lower amperage and higher voltage (but not the reverse) so I slid it in.
Voila! It came up and has been running great for the last few hours.
There's two other things I'd like to do to further restore Crystal Castles:
1) Put new control panel art on it. A guy has been selling "mini" control panel overlays for years. Well, there is no fucking mini. It was the cocktail version of the control panel overlay the whole time. Now I just need to find it again and buy two of them.
2) Fix some wood damage I created moving the game into the bedroom of the apartment, back when we lived there. It destroyed the t-molding on the Player Two side. I've taken that off, and I know I can get new t-molding from www.t-molding.com of all places. (Maybe I'll go white. I think that would look nice.) But the wood damage can be fixed by wicking some wood hardener in there. A Tron restoration I saw recently showed me how that was an option.
the dark and gritty...Ice Cream Jonsey!