John's Arcade Forum - Classic Arcade and Pinball Collecting and Restoring Discussion Forum - RETRO MAME - Nintendo Vs Forum

Having some issues with my Joust cabinet...full story and pictures are here:

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=351531

Any thoughts? I tried the reseating of the ribbon cable from the rom board to the pcb board to no avail...any help is appreciated!

Judging by the symptoms, it does sound like a power supply issue. Are all 3 leds on the power board lit? If not, you could have a blown fuse (best checked with a multimeter). If the leds are all lit, you'll need a multimeter to measure voltages

Orange = -5V
Grey/yellow = +12V
Grey/green = -12V
Grey/white = +12V
Grey = +5V

I'd verify all of that first and see what you find out

Hi All,

Hope people are checking this still . Apologies for the delay, we had a large family health issue that's consumed most of my past week. In any event, I was able to check the voltage at the power supply and all looks good and is:

+12 @ 13.4
-5 @ 5.56
+5 @ 5.53

From what I've gathered from the manual, the next step might be checking the voltage at the ROM chips...does that sound right? I may need a little guidance here also. I also took a video of the error to hopefully provide some information. Any other thoughts or next step ideas would be greatly appreciated.

http://youtu.be/4jBdBKyFDi4

I'm really hoping this isn't an insurmountable issue as I'd like to learn how to do this myself and avoid having to pay someone to fix the game! Thanks as always!

Reflow all header pins. Don't just inspect them, actually reflow all of them. I've owned many Williams machines and every one had cracked solder around the pins.

Sorry...can you explain what you mean in "new guy" terms?

What he is saying is use a soldering iron and go around every connector and reheat up the solder on the pcb for each pin of the connector. John has covered this in a few videos now.

Thanks...I'm assuming this is the chips on the PCB that look soldered already. Would I need to hit anything on the soundboard with all the ROMs or the other (I think I/O?) board?

Actually it's where your wiring harness connects to the boards. You might need to search this topic. I don't want you to mess up your boards. Pm if you need any help and I could text or email pics.
Rob

Thanks! PM sent! Not really sure where to head next on this one...

Suggestion; check your voltages on the power supply and the test points on the board. If I am reading your post correctly, you are getting +5 volts on your -5 volt test point. That is not correct. May be a voltage regulator if that information is correct. There may be other issues also.

I am sure his power supply is just fine and he just measured it wrong. You can't get 5V out of -5V rail.

Just forget to put the negative sign there :)...posting from the iPad! I'm going to try to reflow the solder on the pins this weekend and will report back...thanks for all the imput so far!

Wanted to check in before I went further...

We pulled the pcb yesterday and soldered the header pins, and I'm not sure if I made things worse or better, ha! The lcd error code is gone (but not displaying anything now), but now instead of the sweeping rug patter a static one (i can't seem to add an attachment but can e-mail if it would held) displays. If we move around the plastic connecter closest to the reset button on the board, the pattern will change but not clear up.

I wanted to see if maybe I messed something up before pulling the rest of the boards, but the solder job looks clean. We may resolder the pins on that connection that gets the reaction when moved just to double check before moving on to the others. I'm going to try and clean the pins off today too just in case there is some corrosion or dirt.

I remeasured the voltages on the RAM chips and I'm getting .27 on pin 1 (should be -5???), 13.20 on pin 8 and 5.30 on pin 9. This is leading me to think the -5 from the power supply is attached to the top left connector, and we either (1) didn't get the solder right) or (2) theres an issue with the switching power supply. Do either of these sound plausible?? I measured the -5v at the PCB plastic connector and I get a -5.32 there...

Anyone have any thoughts on this...it looks like I have the right voltage (maybe a bit high?) going to the connector, but the .27 hitting the RAM pin is throwing me. My first guess was maybe I didn't make a great connection when I reflowed the solder on that pin, but now I'm a bit nervous I messed something worse up - any experiences or thoughts on what to try next. Reflowing the solder again is my first step this week. If that doesn't help I feel like I'm back where I started.(http://[img][img][img][img])[/img][/img][/img][/img]

Hi All! Apologies for the delay, we've been out of town for a bit on a vacation for our wedding anniversary...finally back home in the basement

As a quick update, the "second" issue I let you know about was because I didn't have the ribbon cable between the interface board and the PCB connected all the way (get it together, Grant...), so I am back to the "original" issue:

When turned on, the initial rug pattern just repeats, never hitting the "all systems go" screen:

http://youtu.be/4jBdBKyFDi4

The LCD indicator was flashing 1,3,1, which looks (per the manual) to be a RAM error in bank 3, with chip 1. I replaced the chip today with a new one, and still seem to have the same issue/error on the LCD.

I reflowed the solder on the pcb header pins and swapped a few ram chips with no changes. The chips seem to be getting the correct voltages so some may be bad? I also checked the continuity between all header pin solder and the pins and those look good...also getting correct voltages in the connectors themselves. I'm honestly not sure what else to check that I haven't.

If you take the ram chip that is reporting as bad and move it to another slot and the error does not follow the chip then its a problem with the whole ram circuitry. I don't know the game very well since I haven't started fixing them yet so I can't just say off the top of my head what the problem is. My bet is the addressing might be screwed up or the data bus is screwed up. Look at the schematic and follow the ram chips back through the various buffers

Hope things are going well. I had similar issues with other games and it was the processor giving me a ram error. In my case it was the z80. I keep extra on hand now a days. As ian has stated, if the error does not follow the chip, it is something else related to that circuit, maybe the processor.

I ordered the jrok multi Williams board and I'm going to set it to boot right to joust. I'll probably add a new control panel later this year to make it a full MW conversion but keep the original cabinet.