4.5VDC is not getting to the RAM. Could be batteries need changed, could be battery holder is fatiqued, could be diode D2 is bad, could be RAM at U25 is bad.

Check for battery damage while you are in there.

LTG : )

Check that the battery holder is still good. Did any of the pads where the batteries sit fall off? Are they in correctly?

This is when you ask a customer when the last time he changed the batteries? His response: "what batteries"

battery leak (resized).jpg

Time to replace it. Plenty of information out there on how to do so and many different options. One of the pads broke off the old holder and the gum wrapper was acting as the new pad.

Probably. Wouldn't be a bad idea to get a remote battery holder to get those away from the boards.

With a meter - see if battery power is getting onto the board.

Be sure it is wired right.

LTG : )

last pin #24 of the ram should have battery voltage (assuming it is a 6116).

game power off. black lead on ground. red lead p24 of the ram. should be battery voltage. use your dmm to figure out where is open circuit.

NVRAM time?

I would have NVRAM installed.

Did you use new batteries too, or the old ones?

I did not follow this thread because I saw a bunch of posts and figured this would be cleared up by now. But it kept coming to the top. Giving a quick read through the thread I think everyone might have missed the simple solution.

Whenever the batteries die or are removed from the game when off if goes back to factory settings. With many of the System-11 games this also means you get "Adjust Failure" until you open the coin door. Press the advance button and get into the menu to clear. I know you have to do this on Earthshaker, High Speed and Rollergames so I think Wirlwind will probably be the same.

Go in, set to free play and save. Check the manual for specifics for this game. I think with High Speed you had to go into the settings and then back it into the test mode then save. But your game might be fine and you just need to clear this.

Now, after you clear the adjust failure and play a game you need to power the game off for a few seconds and power it back on. If it goes back to factory setting and adjust failure again then yes you are losing the RAM data or power to the RAM.

Hi all -- I had the same problem on my High Speed, and I wanted to thank you all for the inspiration and for nudging me in the right direction to solve my particular problem.

My machine would lose all settings and flash "Adjust Failure" at every startup. I still had the original battery holder with lithium AAs installed. I replaced them with new batteries to no avail. Piecing together advice from this forum entry, (and having the schematic handy also helped a lot), I was able to determine that my battery holder, which looked to be in fine shape, was NFG. I took further inspiration from this YouTube video and decided to install a lithium coin battery socket, and baby, it feels good.

So here's how it went down for me (please refer to the photo for clarity):

I hung my meter's ground to the CPU ground post and tested for voltage at pin 24 on the RAM IC, (U25 on my High Speed), and also at the anode side of the diode at D2 (directly to the left of the battery holder on the board). There was no voltage at either point, but I noticed that if I wiggled the battery holder or held a little pressure on it, voltage would suddenly appear. The holder was fouled.

I cut out the old battery holder with wire cutters and, using a soldering iron, removed the legs and excess solder from the board. I ordered these 2032 sockets from Amazon (~$7 for a set of 5):

https://smile.amazon.com/gp/product/B00E0JRP8C/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00

The legs of this new battery socket happen to line up perfectly with two of the six now open holes at the bottom left of the old AA section on the CPU. Although the socket does sit right up against the IC at U14, it solders in place perfectly.

I also had to run a jumper wire between the old AA battery holder ground connection at the top right over to the top left connector hole to get the negative side of the new battery socket grounded. A trace on the solder side of the CPU connects these two points.

The 2032 now provides a steady 3.1v at the anode side of D2, 2.8v at the cathode, (and the same at pin 24 of U25). This is less than the 4.5v prescribed by the three AAs, but is apparently more than enough for U25 to keep its shit together, and will never leak. My machine now holds all settings and high scores and starts up without error.

Diagram (resized).jpg

If say, a remote battery holder is used instead, it means any time the CPU needs to be removed from the machine for whatever reason, you're probably going to have to unplug this connection, and all settings and scores are lost. The onboard lithium socket eliminates this pitfall that might rub some owners/players the wrong way.

I hope this helps others make a quicker diagnosis of an "Adjust Failure" error. Thanks all!

Paul

Just replying here to say thanks to all for this thread.

I replaced the EPROMs in my pinbot for tournament play, such that the solar value resets to 300k after each game. After replacing the chips I got the adjust failure message, and pressing the advance buttons inside the coin door cleared it.

Love pinside!

The advice was spot on. I shopped out and Earthshaker, got this error when all put back together. Made as few adjustments in the menu, restarted and life is good.

This was the issue I just had. Cleaned some very light corrosion off and noticed two pads had disappeared. Tried to tack a contact on there as a temporary fix till I could get a replacement. Didn’t work. Put a replacement, off board battery pack on temporary till I figure out a permanent option to go with and it works just fine.

Have the adjustment failure message on startup of Rollergames and went through most of the troubleshooting suggested in this thread, but not any ram/rom testing. I have a remote battery holder, so that's the first thing I did; replace the batteries.

Found no bad or missing contacts or connections in the battery holder. Go through reset and free play setting procedures with door audit/adjustment switches and game will play fine until I turn it off. When powering on again, I get the error messages. If coin door is closed, error is "adjustment failure." If door is open when powering on, it's "factory settings." Still have to go into menus and set to free play to get game play again.

Not sure where to go next. Could the door open-closed switch have anything to do with it?

Game not holding memory after battery holder replacement/voltage checks

Suspect D2 broken or faulty

sys11 2 (resized).png

sys 11 img (resized).png

Sys 11 (resized).png

Thanks. I visually inspected D2 and didn't see anything. I'll keep an eye on it. However, I did check all the pin connectors and ROM chips on the boards to make sure they were all snug. Many connectors were not. Like my old Donkey Kong game whose video wigs out sometimes, pressing around on the circuit boards usually helps get something seated properly and clears up some problems. Not sure if what I did actually was what fixed it, but that's my layman's explanation!

with power off, there must be around 4.5V at the cathode side of Diode 2 if not the diode failed and is unable to deliver battery voltage to memory back up.

4553fec2d330149b669c20d1536a19d658282240 (resized).png

Hi all. Had the same issue. Installed new batteries. Set it on free play. Went to the test diagnostics. Shut it off and it held the memory.

Went back an hour later and it did the adjust failure. I checked the batteries and they were pretty much stone dead. Put in new ones (new Duracells) and it killed them too.

Any idea what would cause such a draw?

Thanks in advance!

How long does it take for the batteries to go dead?

Lacking any specific experience with this symptom, the first thing I'd do is verify your hypothesis that the batteries are being drained with an ammeter. It's a little tricky, since you'd have to reroute one end of the battery connection through the ammeter, but it can be done (e.g. slip a couple of metal leaf with an insulator between the battery terminal and the holder's terminal, and then measure current between the leafs).

Another reason the batteries might die is that they are being charged. So before you do anything else, you might check that diode that was mentioned in older posts here, to make sure it didn't get shorted out for some reason.

If you do have high current from the batteries and the diode's fine, then I'd guess whatever is pulling the current is a short somewhere. So try touching the chips and other components on the board to see if anything seems warm.

It could definitely be that diode. They only took about an hour to go from new to dead.

I’ll look up how to test it.

And I have removed the dead batteries. The holder is empty.

Thanks for the prompt response!

Could the diode be in backwards?