Hey all, I have a weird little repair saga and I need advice. I was fixing my friends LOTR (used to be mine). It’s always worked fine for me and I sold it to them a few years ago and it worked great when I put it in their house. After a couple years, they said the backglass stopped lighting. Also, the sound (pinsound original) started to not work. So I went to help.

So it looked like a dead fluorescent situation. On the sound side, pinsound had an amber light and just beeped slowly (the boot up beep) and kept beeping very slowly. No other sounds.

So, I replaced the fluorescent with led. I cut the ballast out and rewired as directed. I turned it on to check and it came on great. At this point I didn’t really notice the status of the rest of the game. It seemed fine (no sound though). So I turned it off and started on the pinsound.

So I tried to update the pinsound firmware and got nothing. Now not even the beeping. So I tried a new downloaded sound package. Still nothing. So I decided to remove it altogether. I was really careful removing stuff. I watched the pinsound install video twice to be sure I reversed the process accurately. I think it went perfectly.

When I got done, I flipped the switch and all the insert lights came on in unison and blinked on-off-on-off at about a half second pace. I quickly shut it back off (maybe three seconds). I rechecked all my work, reseated the processor (very carefully, and triple checked every leg, etc) and connectors. Flipped the switch and a few lights came on and nothing else. The color dmd screen is blank (but has power, i could get into the menu). No inserts. I think just GI came on. All the leds on the main board that indicate voltage are lit. I checked all the fuses. LED1 doesn’t blink or come on solid or anything. The LED tube replacing the fluorescent is going strong tho! Hahaha.

I hate when I try to help someone and end up making it worse!!

So, any help would be appreciated.

Bump to help a bro out?

Thanks for all the helpful posts. Using some of those diagnostic ideas, I narrowed it to the cpu or main board. I swapped the non working board into my working lotr and same symptoms, won’t boot. So I put “dead” processor into my working game and it worked. When removing it I noticed it was really loose in the “bad” board. Upon examination the socket had been replaced and it was very loose feeling. I could change the behavior by flexing the chip around in the socket. So, I flexed all the little pins so they’d grip the processor chip tighter. Put it back together and it all worked!! Thanks again everyone!