Howdy guys. Once again, I'm stuck on a pin and need some help. I'll just preface this with the fact that I'm basically scared to death of working on pins now that I've had 2 blow up on me, so go easy on me. There's literally nobody close to me at all that has pins or knows how to work on pins. It's gotten to the point that I'm afraid to turn one on because I'm waiting for it to pop/smoke, so I rarely even play these days. So... the timelines/info may be off on my recollections below.
My Frankenstein had never had issues before, and months ago was turned on for a friend's kid to play one day. When I went back in the room a bit later to turn it off, I realized the DMD was out. Husband (who is good with electronics but has chronic migraines so rarely feels up to messing with complicated electrical things) poked around on it, and due to what looked like burnt areas on the back of the DMD we determined the DMD was probably shot. So a few weeks later I found a used working large DMD here on Pinside, and it then sat in a box in my house for weeks. He finally swapped them out, and it still didn't work. We thought maybe a fuse blew when everything went bad, so weeks later we finally got around to looking for fuses, replaced those, and by that point it wouldn't even boot up and just had a few playfield lights.
We had (major) issues with my Jurassic Park CPU/power supply before, and I'd sent the CPU/power board out to be repaired as back-up after getting it running with new boards. This weekend husband took the repaired JP CPU and put it in Frankenstein to see if that did anything. It would give us the "Frankenstein" callout, then nothing at all, not even the playfield lights like before. We finally realized we needed to open the coin door (DMD still not working to be able to remind us) so after we opened the door it reset and booted. The playfield lights are on an in attract mode, and it appears that we could play a game (without the DMD) if we could figure out how to put it on free play. It reset to pay for play, and there are no coin mechs in it to be able to use quarters, and we can't see the menu of course. If we turn if off, we have to start over with opening the door.
So, for now we have a non-working DMD and a machine that resets every time we power it on. Husband thinks that since the new DMD is in yet still nothing is working that it may not have even been the DMD at all before, and that the issue is with the display controller board/driver board/ROM board or ROMs themselves. We found this http://www.marcospecialties.com/pinball-parts/520-5092-01 but it is not available. We were going to try to swap our JP or LAH display ROMs into it to see if that did anything, but they use one board and Frankenstein takes 2.
Husband has been looking around and found on vpforums that "Replacement driver boards are like gold dust; both hellishly rare and hellishly expensive." And also "Sega's large DMD's are very very sensetive to the 5 volts. If it's off at all, it's going to reset." So, I'm guessing the CPU went wonky and messed up the voltage, which screwed up my DMD. So right now we've got the working JP CPU in it, the replacement DMD in it, it boots up resets every time, and we can't see what we're doing to be able to test it past that. We are stuck as to what to do next as we aren't positive on a diagnosis and the parts aren't even available. Any suggestions on what we can do/try with this thing?
North Wales, PA
