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From: Rhett James Barnes
Organization: Time Warner Cable of San Diego, CA
Date: Thursday, January 20, 2000 12:37 AM
Subject: Tech Report: Bad Crimp Stops Pac Man
Just wanted to pass on a report of my latest success, just incase anyone
has a similar problem in the future (ok, not likely, but who knows?)
I've got a Pac Man that has been a little flakey for months. If it
hadn't been on for a while, the screen wouldn't light up, and there was no
H-sync noise (until the game was shut off). Though I could see glow in
the neck, and the game sounds were good. If you rocked the game enough
violently back-and-forth, you could usually get it to come back.
I didn't know whether it was a video prob, or if the monitor was dead (it
had been recapped previously). I'm still not up to speed about plugging
games into different monitors (and I thought that the Pac sync was odd).
I did put check the video signals AT THE BOARD with a 'scope, and they
certainly looked ok both when the game was dead and when it was working.
There's not really much on the G07 to wiggle; no daughter boards. So I
wasn't sure where to go from there. Something was lose, just didn't know
where. And it was causing the sync to be bad.
I was about ready to steal video from the PCB to test with a different
monitor, when I decided to pull the video connectors to the monitor
instead. When I pulled the sync connector off, the yellow wire from the
board fell out. Turns out the crimp holding the sync wire and the jumper
wire wasn't so great because it was holding two wires. It had allowed one
of the wires to fall out. Re-did it, and viola.
I guess the point is, make sure that you're checking the signal from the
actual connectors. I was going to steal the video at a more convenient
point, which would have missed the actual problem!
Maybe it's not as universal as the "fuse" problem, but hey, might happen
to someone else!
