I'm still chipping away at these small issues with my EatPM, but now a new one has popped up.

Earlier this week, I powered it up to get some more "play testing" in and I was treated with "Adjustment Failure". I found when I went to change the batteries that one of the batteries was soldered in as the battery holder had a bad contact.

I ordered a remote battery holder and today I pulled the board out and went about removing the old holder and put in the remote. Put the board back in the machine and....

Still getting the same error when I save changes and cycle the power on the machine. Set it to free play, pay a game or two, shut it off and turn it back on a couple of minutes later and the error is back.

I show battery power at the board. Reading some other threads here, I checked for power at the memory chip. I didn't show any power there. I also don't show any power at the diode. So I'm not sure if I have a broken trace or something else going on.

Question now is, do I continue trying to run this issue down, or do I just go with NVRAM? Maybe just go full replacement of the board with a Rottendog MPU? This board isn't horrible, but it does have some signs of the years on it. I attached a picture of some weird solder job by the ram chip, and the board does have some discoloration behind the ceramic resistors.

Unfortunately the RAM chip isn't socketed. I'm comfortable enough to do small things like change a resistor or switching from a onboard battery holder to a remote battery holder. But I've not had to unsolder a chip before. First time for everything I guess...worst thing that can happen is I nuke the board and have to replace it.

This should be my last hurdle on this machine. I think I figured out the flasher issues, I've already gotten half of the non-working flashers going again. One problem was a dead resistor on the interconnect board. I replace that resistor and while going over the drawings I found another resistor that wasn't the correct rated resistor so I have one more to change out.

The game plays fine.

I'll pull the board back out later this week and try to run down the trace.

If you are asking about any leakage damage, I didn't see any of that.

I'm going to pull the board back out in a few days and see if a trace has gone bad and try to put a jumper in if needed. If that doesn't work, I may take you up on that offer.

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Doh!

I had the board flipped over when I hooked up the leads....

Yep, that did it. Switched the wires and that was it. Sheesh...

Anyone else do something really simple and spend hours trying to figure what else was wrong?

Yea, that's what I get for reading the schematics with the board flipped over.

Ah...get a good game going, hit the replay....the cabinet knocker reset the game.

Sigh, it never ends.

Maybe I have the batteries mounted too close to the knocker. It's about 5-6 inches below it on that side of the backbox...

You mean like this one? I figured it's been there since I've had this machine.

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My initial response would be "seems pretty good".

I did a quick cleanup (radio shack solder sucker to the rescue) and with the glass off, just went for non-stop Monster slides until it hit the replay and the knocker fired. I did this twice, it didn't reset either time.

I'll "test" this some more tomorrow.

Yea, it seems to be fine now. I haven't had it reset since I cleaned up the splash. Its weird since I didn't do any soldering from that side of the board when I installed the battery remote.

Now if I can just figure out why these last few flashers aren't working...I've traced all the non-working flashers back to J12 on the CPU board. I have a good connection from the lamps all the way back to that connector. I guess my next step is to change out a few transistors and see if that get them going. I'm not sure what else it could be...

Tried that. Nothing.

While letting the test cycle around the coils/flashers, I did notice that the relay on the power driver board kicked with the working flashers...but it didn't kick when one of the flashers that are not working was up in the test rotation.

Yea, that's what I figured that after trying to ground the transistors. I didn't know you could test them that way.

I've gone through the ceramic resistors and replaced a couple of bad ones on the interconnect board. That brought back a few other flashers that also wasn't working.

Flash lamps in series? Hmm...I checked the connections going from the CPU board all the way to the first lamp socket, but I didn't check the lamps themselves...I'll check that next.

The flashers are wired in parallel, so that's not it.