I picked up a Stern Lightning and the VSU-100 speech board is not working. The speech board looks to be in perfect condition, nothing is hacked or burned. The sound board is working correctly but when you are supposed to hear speech the regular sounds drop out, you hear nothing for speech and then the regular sounds come back.
A little background. The 5101 chips on the MPU were bad so I replaced it with a Pinitech NVRam dual socket board. When I powered it on you could hear speech but it was high pitched and garbled. I cleared all of the audit settings and the speech I was hearing went away.

I thought about replacing the 2 speech ROMs but wanted to know if anyone had advice on what to test or look at before doing that?

Post last edited 8 years ago.

#2 8 years ago

GPE

G-P-E

GPE

Omaha, NE

13y 76,800 2,778 4

Original caps on the board?

#3 8 years ago

???

Evilive69

Pinside member

Gambrills, MD

8y 43,300 251 2

Yes. The board is 100% original. I'm guessing the caps would be a good place to start.

#4 8 years ago

MEL

Superchicken

Pinside member

11y 56,150 639 15 7

I had the same thing happen on F2K. Recapped, new TI vocalizer IC still nothing. Swapped ROMs and IC into working Catacomb board they work fine. I think I will be sending it to CoinOp Cauldron.

#5 8 years ago

???

Evilive69

Pinside member

Gambrills, MD

8y 43,300 251 2

Does coin-op cauldron fix them?

#6 8 years ago

MEL

Superchicken

Pinside member

11y 56,150 639 15 7

It is listed on their web site.

http://webpages.charter.net/coinopcauldron/brepairs.html

#7 8 years ago

RLH

Lovef2k

WalltoWallPinball

Carneys Point Township, NJ

11y 89,300 3,867 6

Make sure the speech option is in the on position in the MPU dip switch settings. Typically the speech chip goes bad on these. The TSI- S14001A if I can recall. These were used in Stern vids like Berzerk and Frenzy. Also used in talking calculators. These IC's are obsolete and very expensive if you can find a NOS chip. Lastly, well maybe check this first but I just thought of it, the ribbon cable MPU J5 make sure it's good.

1 month later

#8 8 years ago

???

Evilive69

Pinside member

Gambrills, MD

8y 43,300 251 2

After rebuilding most of the VSU I now have speech. The overall problem was a bad 4081 chip at U6.

Promoted items from Pinside Marketplace and Pinside Shops!

$ 119.95

Boards

Ultimate LED/Lamp Driver Board

Allteksystems

$ 125.00

Boards

VSU-2 Speech Board - Replacement for VSU-100

Glodstone

From: $ 169.00

Boards

RetroPinUpgrade REV 102 Arduino Board Assembled, Programmed

RoyGBev Pinball

3,000 (Firm)

Machine - For Sale

Lightning

Malboro, NJ

Santis

From: $ 170.00

Displays

Set of Blue LED displays for Bally/Stern pinball machines

PinballSolutions.eu

From: £ 110.00

Electronics

Bally / Stern Solenoid Driver Board Tester - Kit, self buid

Retro Electro Designs

$ 3.00

Hardware

Classic Stern Drop Target Reset Link

20eyes

$ 12.00

Electronics

Stern power supply wiring harness

Third Coast Pinball

Hey modders!

Open a free Shop and start selling on Pinside

Your shop name here

Reply

Wanna join the discussion? Please sign in to reply to this topic.

Hey there! Welcome to Pinside!

Donate to Pinside

Great to see you're enjoying Pinside! Did you know Pinside is able to run without any 3rd-party banners or ads, thanks to the support from our visitors? Please consider a donation to Pinside and get anext to your username to show for it! Or better yet, subscribe to Pinside+!

This page was printed from https://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/stern-vsu-100-issue and we tried optimising it for printing. Some page elements may have been deliberately hidden.

Scan the QR code on the left to jump to the URL this document was printed from.