I've been trying to get a DMD working on location for a Striker Extreme. Sort of as a family favor turned into a personal vendetta to get the damn pinball machines working (it's at Arkey Blues' in Bandera, TX for the curious). The thing has more problems than just the DMD, but without that it's hard to do much. The old display would occasionally sometimes flash to life for brief periods of time.

I thought it was the power or driver boards so I replaced both and used my own DMD from my STTNG to try it out. After all that, still ended up with basically the same problem (only I think I killed my own DMD as it's now showing a garbled display after putting it back in my TNG :/).

Having replaced basically everything along the chain, it got me to thinking it might be something on the CPU board. I noticed the HCT273 chip next to the video ribbon cable was getting almost too hot to touch. I was curious if anyone thought that might be a decent indication it was failing?

The machine itself sometimes blinks lights on the playfield, and makes various sound effect noises when I power up the machine with the service button pressed. So the CPU seems to be working.

Since my DMD is busted, I went ahead and sprung for a ColorDMD (YEAH!) but kinda nervous in buying a DMD for Striker if it seems to be eating DMDs With a new power and controller board, seems hard to believe whatever is coming from that ribbon cable could do that kinda damage (perhaps I unknowingly did it while working on both *shrug*).

Any idears?

Looks like according to Pinwiki (http://www.pinwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Sega/Stern_White_Star_Repair#Failed_74HCT273_buffer_IC_on_the_MPU_board) it's probably the IC. Or at least it's suspect. I did the referenced test and 3 of the legs (pins 5-7) indicated shenanigans. So that's at least one issue with the board. Does anyone have experience with a failed 273? Is it possible for it to, under rare cases, show an actual image for a brief period of time?

For a couple bucks worth of a chip and socket, probably worth trying out but I'm gonna see what the owner wants to do.

oh wow, well thanks then Chris! I owe you a beer for that one as that section was super helpful!

Do you happen to have any advice on mounting hardware for the display for WhiteStar? It's much more straightforward on my STTNG. In fact, I suspect that's where I broke my own DMD in trying to mount it properly.

And yes, definitely a remote battery holder. Trying to fix battery damage on one of those is a big ole NOPE for me. In fact, I put an AnyPin NVRAM chip on my STTNG the first day I got it Folks thought I was nuts, but I was merely just really paranoid