Hey, friends. Well, I need your help. I have never seen this before. I'll cut right to it.

Everything works in the game as it should, you would assume it's all functioning until you play a game and notice the score never changes and is stuck at 0?? The game does have a colorDMD in it.

Here is what I have tried/inspected so far:
- Service update to the display harness to ensure good 5v
- Swapped out roms, to ensure it was not a rom issue
- Tried the original dot matrix display and has the same issue.
- all ribbon cables are oriented properly,
- all ribbon cable headers have no missing pins.
- I have a new ribbon cable on the way, but the one that is in the game currently appears to be fine.

I literally am at a loss, the only thing I can think of is something wrong with the video driver board, or maybe the CPU board.

I would love any direction, as I literally have no idea where to go from here. thank you !

Thinking more about this i wonder if this could be a memory issue... not storing

thanks I have... and from my tech tells me system memory is stored differently than in game... so it would be the 6264 chip on the CPU... I have ordered and VNram to see if maybe that helps.

Boy wouldn't that be nice!

installed NVRAM, and a new ribbon cable... sadly did not fix the issue... so there has to be a bad chip or something on one of the boards, wow this is frustrating

Thank you I actually have a Color DMD, Its so sad the game is basically not playable. My only hope is my tech works his magic. Apprecaite it!

Thanks, yep I have already had extensive talks with colorDMD. it is not the display. I actually have the original dot matrix display I plugged back in, and though it does not really work, I got it working long enough to determine the score problem was persisting on the old screen as well. I also tried replacing the power board, same issue. LIteraly the last thing I can think of is a chip, or something on the CPU... So I bit the bullet and ordered a rotten dog replacement to try. If it is not the CPU... I give up and it becomes an over-sized paper weight.

Ok, wow. We have it fixed. My Tech, who is very good, had never in all his years seen something like this. After hours and hours of testing, debugging, and manually triggering scores, my tech finally noticed that the culprit was a chip on the CPU. Most of us had come to the conclusion it was something on the board. Here is the summary from my tech:

"Problem from the factory! Auto insertion (“pick and place”) machine failed to bullseye a couple of pins on this chip into their holes.  The bent under legs made good enough connections to their pads that the board worked, probably for decades that way. Eventually, the one on pin 1 made a poor connection, since it is not actually soldered. Because the memory protect switch was all busted up and failed to make a connection, no one could even tell there was a problem, since the problem only happens when the computer sees the door closed. Replacing the bad memory protect switch revealed the problem, and now we can SEE the problem, without even using test equipment. These bent legs are the inputs to the quad NAND gate that determines if the ram is being addressed. "

Amazing. I wanted to share in the rare case someone else runs into this

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