As I understand it, Gorgar is supposed to say "Me Got You" when the ball is knocked into The Pit. I'm also pretty sure he's supposed to talk more than he actually is. For instance, when the 1-2-3-4 sequence is completed, all he says is "HURT". When the game is over, he just says "GORGAR" twice.

I did the sound test with the button on the board, and it plays through all the sounds but speech is a little messed up . GORGAR, HURT and GOT come out just fine, but the tail end of SPEAKS and all of YOU, BEAT and ME are garbled with this high-pitched squeal. I reseated the chip that drives those sounds, but no luck. I'm considering looking for one or more replacement chips.

The question is if one issue might be related to the other. My understanding is that sounds are triggered by the driver board firing the various inputs as if they were solenoids. If one or more transistors on the driver board aren't working, then that would explain why various sounds are missing from the game. Is the game smart enough to know that if sounds such as YOU and ME are somehow damaged - that it shouldn't play them? Perhaps one or more blown transistors on the driver board are why the sounds are now garbled. (I find that there are rarely any coincidences in pinball machines.)

That breakdown's in the manual, actually. At the very least I'm sure I'll need new chips. But I think I'm going to have to do a full investigation to see ifnthere's something going on witht the driver board that caused the chip to go bad in the first place.

I'm looking around, and one test that I see recommended is grounding out certain transistors to fire the solenoids that are associated with the various sounds. I know what it means to ground things out, but I've never grounded anything while the machine is actually on. How would I go about doing this kind of test?

Grounding out these transistors turned out to be as easy as clipping a jumper wire to the metal tab coming from the top and touching the base plate with the other end. If I wanted to ground multiple ones at once, I just clipped the other end to a screw driver and then touched the screwdriver to the base plate or touched a grounded jumper wire to the screwdriver.

I went through and grounded out all 32 combinations of transistors Q31, 33, 35, 37, and 39. (Actually, it was 32 -1 since all zeroes is a null combination.) What follows are some of the results I got. From what I can tell, all of the sounds work perfectly. Speech, however, is really spotty - and those results are documented here. If anyone else has a Gorgar machine, I'd really appreciate some confirmation on what these transistor combinations are supposed to result in.

31, 39: No Sound
35, 39: Static with no sound. It's possibly trying to talk.
37, 39: "Gorgar Speaks". "Speaks" has a bit of squealy static at the end of it, possibly indicating a failed speech chip.
31, 33, 39: No sound. The heartbeat sound stops permanently unless I jumper 33, 39 again. This is probably by design.
31, 37, 39: "Gorgar"
33, 37, 39: "Gorgar"
35, 37, 39: "Hurt Gorgar"
31, 35, 37, 39: "Hurt"
33, 35, 37, 39: "Got"
31, 33, 35, 37, 39: "Gorgar"

As I said earlier, when I do the sound board self-test, there's a high-pitched squeal where "You", "Beat" and "Me" are supposed to be. I think I can barely make them out behind the squeal. But I don't hear any attempt to play those three sounds in any of the jumper combinations. Plan A is to replace the sound ROMs, but I'm wondering what I can do to troubleshoot if that doesn't result in all the words being said when they should. I'm also wondering why the game wouldn't at least try to play those three words, even if they just ended up coming out all squealy.

Anyone have any ideas?

I found which chips produce which words:

GORGAR: 4961
SPEAKS: 4961, 4962
YOU: 4962
BEAT: 4962
ME: 4962, 4963
HURT: 4963
GOT: 4963

I certainly don't think it's a coincidence that the tail end of SPEAKS, and all of YOU, BEAT and ME have the squeal in them when the board's sound test is run and that they're all on the same chip. It's also probably not a coincidence that three of those words don't show up in my manual input pin testing at all. The question remains, though: Is this a problem with the ROM chip or some other part? I'd hate to waste 30 bucks and wait four days for new chips to get here to find out that the problem is up or downstream.

I'll look into the other stuff you mentioned before pulling the trigger on new ROMs.

The sockets are all RN sockets, but they look like they're on there pretty tight. None of the solder points look bad, and I can't move the sockets around with any kind of reasonable force.

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I've been tracing through the schematic and I'm definitely in over my head when it comes to being able to map out why grounding certain pins produces, say, "Got" instead of "Me Got You". I guess some parts of the system are just going to remain a black box until I get really familiar with the inner workings of the Motorola 6821.

Which one is the factory one? I suspect that 4962 is the bad one, but I'm replacing all three just to be sure. I have this sinking feeling that it won't work.

Yeah, I replaced all three ROMs and everything worked out fine.