(Topic ID: 110363)

My Congo is having serious problems.

By Troutfarm

9 years ago


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  • 29 posts
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  • Latest reply 9 years ago by Troutfarm
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#1 9 years ago

Had a couple issues in a few different posts.. consolidating here.

timeline of problems:

1. Machine arrived from shipping here and its doing factory resets and time/date loss on startup (changed batteries resat all cables things seemed ok for a couple power cycles)

2. Noticed electrical sound/vibration coming from under pf not related to ramp diverter or post activity.
https://vimeo.com/112547324

3. Game was being played for 2 hour or so with no issues.. then suddenly went off during play.. then went into a restarting loop eventually just not starting up at all.. turned machine off for a while. powered back on and got time and date not set error. game was stable for a game or 2.
here is a video of what the led's on the boards were doing when the game was not fuctional. pay no attention to the Shadow sound.
https://vimeo.com/112555949

4. next day powered game up and things seem fine.. played a couple games with no incident after letting game idle for a 20 minutes or so, game began to start a resetting loop.

5. noticed humming coming from power supply
https://vimeo.com/112587008

6. turned game on 30 minutes after turning it off from event #4 and it seems to been stable without being played for the last 30 minutes.

7. Now I am doing some voltage tests..

pics of the boards.
2014-11-21 20.19.48.jpg2014-11-21 20.19.48.jpg
2014-11-21 20.19.57.jpg2014-11-21 20.19.57.jpg
2014-11-21 20.20.04-246.jpg2014-11-21 20.20.04-246.jpg

#2 9 years ago

played a few games.. left game on for an hour or so and it restarted to factory settings.. then started the restart loop shortly after.

#3 9 years ago

Sell it to Syco.

#4 9 years ago

Are the connectors in the battery holder free of all corrosion? My congo had a similar problem and when I looked very close to the metal tabs that hold the batteries in place ( and provide connectivity), one of the bottom tabs had a layer of acid corrosion preventing connectivity. I scraped the corrosion off the metal tab and got a good connection between the battery / connector and all was fine. Good hunting

#5 9 years ago

Your boards actually look pretty nice outside of the diode hack job on the previous thread! And the fact that you're checking voltages puts you one step ahead of where I would have called in the big guns. Good luck, and I'm still looking forward to what you find out!

#6 9 years ago

some of those diodes look like they're missing the eyelet and solder.g.l.joe

#7 9 years ago

Driver board swapped with MM and it seems to be working fine. Minus the gi which is because the connection is not the same between Congo and MM.

#8 9 years ago
Quoted from Troutfarm:

Driver board swapped with MM and it seems to be working fine. Minus the gi which is because the connection is not the same between Congo and MM.

The connection of the GI is the same on congo and mm. The boards are identical wpc95 boards.

#9 9 years ago

Game is still restarting after being on for an extended time.

And here is the photo of no missing pin on j103
image.jpgimage.jpg

#10 9 years ago

Guess it's time to break out the wire cutters

#11 9 years ago

Wire cutters for the win. GI is on.

#12 9 years ago

What are some things to look for on the cpu board other than the battery holder that could be causing resets?

#13 9 years ago

you swapped power boards and everything works now. Why are you still investigating the cpu board? If the game is fixed with a new power board then it's not the cpu board.

#14 9 years ago

I thought it was all good, but it's still seems to be resetting and going back to factory settings after it sits idle for too long..

#15 9 years ago

Replace your battery pac on CPU to a external one.

#16 9 years ago

this is what happens after the game sits for a while.. starts going into reboot loop. one of the resets actually sound like it fires a coil..
https://vimeo.com/112660940

#17 9 years ago

ordered a RD cpu board.. Will probably send this one out to be gone over thoroughly. I think the problem is beyond my skill level.

#18 9 years ago

You verified it was the cpu board? Easy to do by swapping with the mm cpu board swapping also the rom and security chip. See if problem moves with board or stays with game.

#19 9 years ago

pretty easy to swap those chips? I have not done that before.

#20 9 years ago

Cpu board swapped and all is well.. I have a friend who is going to replace the asic socket and battery holder for me. Thanks for the tips.

1 week later
#21 9 years ago

Game is up and running solid.. only problem now is every once in a while the sound goes out and comes back at the default volume level.. when I go to change it, it still is shows the level it was at before the issue and as soon as I change the value it corrects the level.. pretty strange. It is happening at different times during the game, so it seems 1 particular thing is not causing it. Thoughts?

#22 9 years ago

D1-D2 and U5 on the CPU board look like they have battery corrosion, which means that battery pack needs to be removed asap. You may have some trace damage on the opposite side of the board there. Hopefully not, but that battery holder is definitely your issue.

#23 9 years ago

I have a rottendog board installed

1 week later
#24 9 years ago

I am stumped.. thought it was my driver board. but the board has been swapped and the same symptoms. I have a new CPU and Driver board installed so the problem has to be a short of some kind under the playfield?

when the game powers up.
-lamps work except lamps in row 3 are locked on.
-flashers go on solid.. (i immediately turn game off)
-coils at left flipper, right sling, and the kicker to amy all fire..

any ideas?

The game was working. I did change out some flashers, but now the ones I changed are out just to rule them out.

does this some like a short somewhere? Seems odd that those 3 different things would be related.

HELP! thanks.

#25 9 years ago

What happened between now and "cpu board swapped and all is well" 2 weeks ago?

#26 9 years ago

Changed some flashers(I have removed them, installed ledocd and GIOCD, but they are both out of the equation at the moment. Things are back to the way they were before problems. I have been searching for loose wires below but I can find nothing.

#28 9 years ago

You can't blindly search for stuff. It needs to be systematic. Have you swapped all your ribbon cables with medieval madness? Do that next.

The row of lights stuck on sounds like a direct short on row 3 or whatever row you said. Could be at the board or somewhere in the wiring. The wiring could be blowing the transistor on the board as well making it appear that swapping boards had no effect. Doors the same power board out into Medieval madness operate row 3 lights correctly? How do you know? How are you testing that?

When you power on the game and flashers or coils lock on, that means they are directly shorted to ground. It seems more likely that having so many is caused by the cpu or such than having 10 transistors or 10 wires shorts. The ribbon cable between the cpu and power board is suspect here. Have you swapped that and verified all the pins are making connect and not touching on either end?

#29 9 years ago

it was the ribbon between the cpu and the driver board.. it was brand new so I did not question it before.

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