Old notes are bulleted, with inner bullets updating the work I did:
- Battery corrosion. This had one of the “DataSentry” style black batteries of doom. … I have so far removed the battery but not cleaned the damage.
- Ultimately, I just stopped. I have parts to rebuild the reset section, but it’s working; why fight with it?
- Computer has been trashed. Like every 80B computer, this has a piggyback board arrangement where the solder joints fatigue and crack. … [T]his involves desoldering the board so I can work on the underside. Unfortunately someone decided to go to war with the thing on the top side. I did finally get the board off, but I am afraid I have damaged the plated-through holes. I obliterated at least one pad on the bottom and damaged another.
- I bought one of the GPE daughterboards. Highly recommended. The redundancy that this board adds helps make up for my mistakes, and Gottlieb’s mistakes.
- Ramp cracked at entrance badly.
- I have a new ramp, but it’s not installed.
- Sounds lacking. So I can hear some correct sounds, but mostly it’s static. Can’t hear the music. I want to take a look at this, but there’s no reason to until grounds are verified.
- I did put this off until after the ground mods, but the ground mods weren’t required. All the grounds in this game are one big common (eventually) and that was easy to verify.
- The actual problem was one or more bad ROMs on the sound board. I verified this by swapping parts with my Monte Carlo, which had a working sound board. This was much easier than trying to go at it with an oscilloscope… which I also did.
- Ground mods not done. I suspect this is causing sound problems. At least one set of pins (this game has five) is burned badly.
- I did the major ground mods. Didn’t fix the sound (not surprising). I’m not happy with them, though, because it means permanently rerouting a cable in a way I just don’t love. I may try and come up with another method the next time I do this.
- Lots of lamps missing.
- Bad sockets and bad bulbs. I need to solder some sockets “shut”, but that’s about it.
- Driver board has transistors replaced with the twisted-leg hack.
- Replaced with CEN-U45.
- Black rubber on playfield. Ew.
- Yeah, still haven’t had time to shop the game.