Marlborough, MA
Quoted from not4tilts:I had my thing up/down opto board rendered non-functional when somehow out of the blue that little tab that slides in and out of the optos caught a wire and tried to drag it through the opto space. It looks like the opto cracked at the PCB but haven't dug heavily in to it other than to see that the down opto fails the switch test now.
Anyway - I have heard that there is a new opto replacement board for this that buffers the optos from the switch matrix and supposedly draws significantly less power. Does anyone have any info on this? Was there a thought that the current design was problematic? It has worked fine for 20 years ....
The new buffered Thing opto board should work well with Rottendog replacement MPU boards. Talking with an EE friend of mine about this and he concluded
Bally should have used the same LM339 opto board for the thing optos to report to but they didn't for some reason. So no buffering on thing optos just direct reporting to the switch matrix. And depending on sensitivity and thresholds of the different MPU boards, thing may not report correctly as the optos are not buffered. New board is how Bally should have designed it in the first place as it is a game weakness for this title.
Vancouver, BC
