I'm having an issue with a Middle Earth Pinball MPU. The machine was initially in a reset loop at power up. I discovered a couple of bad chips and replaced those, but also discovered several bodge wires that weren't in the schematic. All but one, I figured out, and repaired properly. The remaining one was a ground connection to the counter at A8, pins 2&3 as shown in the attached pic. At present, the watchdog timer is not working properly. If I follow the flowchart in the troubleshooting manual from IPDB and get to the step where I clip and lift C9 pin 5 (Wake up reset), the program appears to run, as long as A8 pins 2&3 are grounded. If I remove that bodge the HALT signal to the MPU triggers as soon as A10 reaches count 2 and the reset line goes low and stays low. I can't seem to get past that point. Even following the Leon Borre test procedure, I can't get past the initial point where the test LED should flash with no ROM socketed. From looking at the schematic, it looks like maybe A10 should never get to Count 2, or possibly I'm not seeing what resets the system after A10 pin 9 goes high at count 2. Looks to me like the system will just hang at that point.

(I'm used to working on Bally, Williams, and Gottlieb boards, but this is the first Atari board I've worked on. Different beast altogether.)

Any ideas?

Timer Bodge (resized).png