My Fish Tales power driver board slowly died over the last couple months.

The symptoms I'm experiencing are that none of the lights on the cabinet come on when I turn on the machine. The DMD works absolutely fine and I can even start a game, but only the flippers have power, not even the ball launch has power.

This was a slow death crawl that progressed. In the beginning, I could power on the machine and everything would become normal after maybe 10 seconds. Then that progressed to 1 minute, now it has progressed to 5 to 10 minutes.

I know that if I swap in a rotten dog board all of the problems go away, so I narrowed it down to the power driver board. I've done the usual troubleshooting, checking and reseating all the couplers multiple times, replacing fuses, reflowing cold solder joints. I even replaced a bridge rectifier that looked potentially problematic.

Not sure what to check next. Here are some voltages I took while the machine did not have illumination:

TP1 13.92
TP2 4.91
TP3 11.89
TP4 .368
TP5 -.06 mv
TP6 70.4
TP7 20.8
TP8 16

Any help is greatly appreciated!

That's a good thought and something I did consider, I tried swapping out a ribbon cable from another game at one point and that did not correct the problem. The cable in the game currently looks to be in excellent condition.

It feels like a voltage or capacitance issue, but I just don't know how to tackle it.

When I plug in the Rottendog driver board, all problems go away.
I already replaced BR2 since it was failing the diode test, I just pulled the board again and checked all the BRs including the new one and they pass the diode test.

I did notice that led number 3 was blinking at some point when the machine was booting up (I think that is for low voltage detection). Based on the voltage readings in my first post that would make sense.

Maybe another piece of useful information, the longer I wait in between turning on the machine, the longer it takes to turn on completely. if I wait an hour or two in between turning on the system, everything turns on normally quickly. If I wait a day, it takes a minute or two. If I wait a couple days, it takes up to 10 minutes.

That really feels like a capacitor issue, but looking at all the capacitors they look fine. Is there a way to test them?

Thanks for the tip! I will try testing them.

So I just checked and C2 on the board steadily declines in ohms when I check it. Does that mean it is bad then? It does look somewhat suspect like it has already been replaced and there is a wire trace someone added for it to connect to what I think is a transistor with a heat sink on it (see pic).

There was some other capacitors, mostly the very large ones, that I could not get any ohm readings on.

15809513218313131690507141288406 (resized).jpg

I also saw that if C2 goes bad usually the fliptronics go haywire. The flippers are the one thing in the machine that actually work immediately when booting up. I'm still quite at a loss of what to do here.

No there is not. Should there be?

You, sir, are a godsend! First of all, I can't believe you were able to diagnose my issue so easily, and second of all I can't believe your eagle eyes to see that the trace was bad. I put in a jumper wire, and everything is perfect. Thank you so much, my friend across the ocean!!

Ah, thanks for the explanation. It all makes sense now. I'll definitely hit you up if I have any further problems. Thanks!