Whirlwind Lives!
What a week. Our Whirlwind pinball machine CPU board returned from repairs after five weeks on Tuesday. Elated, I plugged it in and — viola! — the game started up! Well, mostly. You see, half the sounds were missing. Over the past few evenings I’ve poured over Whirlwind circuit board schematics and newsgroup postings, trying to find some clue as to what’s going on. We even bought demonstrated working replacements for two associated circuit boards, and still the problem persisted. (Throughout this time I had sent three e-mails to the fellow who repaired the CPU board, only the first unanswered, blaming the aforementioned associated boards.)
Tonight, after more studying of schematics and probing with the multimeter, I posted to the newsgroup in desperation. A reply came that made me think of an easy way to answer one of the questions I had about how the system work: remove two of the five sound ROMs (memory that holds the sound effects for the game). In removing one of them I noticed that one pin was bent outward. It had not been in its socket. I nudged it in line, started the game, and the silly girl’s voice chimed, “Looks like rain!” Victory!!!
How sad that such a simple problem caused me so much frustration this week (and even cost us over $150 in circuit boards we will now hawk on eBay, most likely). Also curious that the board passed the repair guy’s sound test with that chip leg hanging out. Very curious indeed.
Well, enough writing about the game. Time to play! There are still several things to fix, but at least it’s pretty playable. Hooray!
July 17th, 2006 at 10:53 am
Sometimes its the simple things that we overlook when trying to solve a problem. I recently had an engine speed problem that caused me to spend many many hours trying to solve. After many failed attempts, including replacing springs, reseting the governor, etc. I when back again to tech support one last time and listed every step we had been through. After an exchange of emails word finally came about a potential fix, a simple turn of an adjustment screw which had never been mentioned or discussed in all conversations, emails or manuals as a step in the troubleshooting procedure. It worked.
The bottom line, always look at all associated compontents of a potential problem before concluding a course of action.