I have a Pinbot project that has a non-working sound board. The speach works, but there is no background music. I went to a fellow Pinsider's place and used his working Pinbot to test it as follows:

* Put all 5 of my game, sound and music roms in the working Pinbot (using all of that machine's boards) and everything worked fine.
* Put my suspect sound board in the working Pinbot and got the same result as in my machine: no music (ran the music test and started a game).
* One-by-one, swapped all of the socketed chips from working Pinbot's sound board to my sound board (still installed in the working Pinbot), with no change.
* Swapped the data cable end-to-end (it was the one with the working Pinbot). No change.
* I did the "diode test" on all of the non-socketed ICs and compared the results to those on the working sound board. All compared favorably.
* I installed new amps (2003). No change.

I am officially dead in the water with this one. I do have a known-to-be-working B-11581 from an Earthshaker. It has two ROMs installed and the Pinbot has only one at U4 on the sound. Can the 11581 be used in the Pinbot?

Does the 11581 need to have jumpers changed to work with one ROM instead of two? The Earthshaker ROMs are at U4 and U19. The Pinbot ROM would populate only U4.

Thanks, great info. The 11581 had two 27256 ROMs in it, thus no jumpers at W2 or W3. I placed the single Pinbot ROM at U4, installed it in the Pinbot and the music is now working as it should, but now the voice is not working! BTW, the B-11581 is a newer board that does NOT have U6/U7/U18 populated. Could that present an issue using it with an 11a?

I flipped the cable end for end. No change. Flipped the ribbon cable also. No change. I am going to go through the original board and replace all of the chip sockets and test the board after each one is replaced to see if that is the issue with it not working. I'm running out of bullets!

Red herring on the speech not working. I put the old sound board back in after replacing an IC socket. It still didn't work, but neither did the speech. I'll have to check what that issue is related to. Maybe I didn't get the speech ROMs properly installed when I got done with testing on the working Pinbot. I am reasonably confident that when I get that working, I will be able to use the 11581 for the music. I'll keep you informed.

Great! I'm am confident it will all work if I can just get the speech working again!