Gorgar!
Tonight I fixed Gorgar! Mostly. There are still some dead lamps, and I don’t think the drop targets are working, but most of the lamps work, you can actually play a game, and he doesn’t shut down or lock up after a couple seconds.
Jayson had been advocating sacrificing a virgin, but I don’t know any (women, anyway), and I decided to attempt the least-illegal approach first. (If you’re wondering where this talk of sacrificing virgins is coming from, please see the backglass at right.)
The fix was to replace the 40-pin interconnect that links the CPU and driver board together. Basically, this huge 40-pin connector gets worn out and the connection gets flaky, resulting in the game acting up in all sorts of unpleasant ways. I wouldn’t normally devote a blog entry to such a fix, but this was my first respectable soldering job, and frankly I’m proud of it. I bought a new soldering iron a couple weeks ago (a fancy one with temperature control) and it has made all the difference. I should have started with it, rather than the $3.99 (a $0.50 value!) soldering iron that came with my electronics toolkit. It was also helpful in doing some work on Silverball Mania.
I bought a new interconnect board for use in Whirlwind (I suspect my prior, Kindergarden-esque solder job to the same board is the cause of a few lingering problems). It needs some work first, but at least I feel much better equipped to handle it. It should be cake after desoldering five 8-pin connectors (40 total pins) and then re-soldering each of them with new connectors, and I won’t have to be embarrassed of what lies beneath the interconnect board on Whirlwind (ugly wire patches to fix the pads I lifted).