I have an Alvin G - Al's Garage Band Goes on a World Tour that has developed some flaky audio issues. The background music comes and goes from game to game and sometimes cuts out and comes back during a game. Also some sound effects are either missing randomly or are cut off midway through playing. These issues started happening after the game was at the 2011 TPF.

I was about to pull the MPU and audio board and reflow the headers that connect the two boards together. Is there anything else I should check out that may be the cause?

I have noticed that if I turn off the game and unplug/replug the ribbon cable sometimes it seems to help for a game or two. Could the ribbon cable be bad as well?

The only other issue that needs to be fixed on the game is the switch in the VUK at the lower right corner of the playfield fails to reliably detect a ball sitting in the VUK and as a result several can pile up causing it to fail to eject the ball during ball search. It is probably a misadjusted microswitch or a faulty switch...

There is not much in the way of technical repair how-to guides for the Alvin G pins and not many people I know have ever played or worked on one.

Thanks for any help or ideas of possible causes or fixes to look into.

-- Shawn

Thanks for the info Matt.

I will go head and try to order a replacement microswitch for the VUK. And for now I will try to reflow all of the header pins on the MPU and audio boards to see if that helps. Should hopefully get some time to pull it out and work on it this weekend...

-- Shawn

Follow up on the earlier issue with this pin... It turned out that the IDC connection was flakey on the power supply board where the power for the sound card came from. The sound board was rebooting every few seconds randomly with the vibration in the game. Once the power connector was fixed the sound now works properly again. Also the VUK just needed some tweaking to get the microswitch to register the ball correctly. Hope this info helps anyone else who is having these issues with an Alvin G. pin...

-- Shawn