(see 2 for my rope light question) The rest is for background information.

1) I initially installed a Rottendog MPU along with all of my other changes and the Pinsound board worked initially. Then after turning the machine off, it would only work randomly. It appears that the Rottendog MPU and the Pinsound board don't always communicate. I contacted PinSound and they are working on a firmware update to make the board more responsive to recognizing the Rottendog MPU each time since I wasn't the only person with this problem. So, I repaired my Data East MPU board and switched back for the interim. That board works with the PinSound board every time. So clearly there is a compatibility issue between the Rottendog MPU and the PinSound board based on that troubleshooting. Just mentioning that here in case anybody else runs into the same problem.

2) I've noticed that my rope lights don't work exactly as they should when I go into test mode or when the machine is running. They operate as OFF/OFF/1/2&3 SIMULTANEOUSLY instead of OFF/1/2/3. I've seen posts about this that talk about a short between two of the strands causing this problem in addition to posts about the driver board for those lights getting fried. However, this is the strange part. When the Rottendog MPU board was in the backbox, the rope lights worked exactly as they should OFF/1/2/3 without doing anything to the lights or to the special board for the rope lights. As soon as I went back to the Data East board, it was back to OFF/OFF/1/2&3 SIMULTANEOUSLY. That makes me think that there isn't a short or a problem with the special board but instead there is a problem in my Data East MPU board.

3) When I received the pin, the knocker had been disconnected and the coil was sitting in the bottom (without any of the rest of the knocker mechanism). The coil had a melted coil sleeve in it. I purchased a new knocker and installed it and it worked fine. Of course, I had already replaced my power supply with Rottendog and the playfield power supply with rottendog before I ever tried this new knocker. However, since I've been having the sound cutout problem with my pinsound board, I decided to put my old data east power supply back in to see if the cutout problem went away. This would tell me if there was the regulated/unregulated 12v issue causing my sound problems. However, with the old power supply back in, the knocker went crazy and started pounding away nonstop from the moment I hit the start button to try it all out. I turned the machine off and on and had the same problem again, so I just took the data east power supply out and put the rottendog back it and then the problem was gone.

What do you think?