I picked up a TZ about 6 months ago. It needed a lot of work, but most of it was elbow grease, and the machine plays pretty well now. A couple issues are left that are mostly just cosmetic and will require spending a little money.

The only puzzling thing is that the machine frequently factory resets when I leave it off for more than a few days. If I play it every day, or every couple days, it seems to be fine. But when life catches up to me and I leave it off for a week or more, it will often report "Factory Settings Restored"'.

I don't see any board corrosion and the batteries are fresh. Any ideas?

I do plan on doing a remote battery holder at some point, but it was low on my priority list. Maybe I'll bump it up. I'll also check the diodes, if I can figure out how. Been a while since I've done electrical stuff.

Thanks

Checked the batteries. All three read steady at over 1.54 V. In the holder, I get a steady 4.99 across all three. There's a little corrosion on the side clips, but the contact points all look clean.

Measured both diodes. D1 measures -212 (the negative seems weird to me, but I've never really tested diodes before). D2 reads at 499.

At the memory, I'm reading a voltage of 4.44, which appears to be correct, accounting for the drop across the diode.

So none of those would appear to be the issue, unless that 1 negative sign is a concern.

Forgot to mention that both D1 and D2 read open in the opposite direction, so they're not shorted.

Everything looks pretty clean, except for the clips.

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I just ordered all new ribbon cables (a suggestion from outside PInside). I've had luck with that resolving weird issues before.

I have every intention of going with a remote battery holder, but if it turns out that I've got damage I can't see, I might just go with a Rottendog board that comes with a remote battery holder.

Remote Battery holder is ordered. Should arrive about the same time as the ribbon cables. Hopefully those two swaps will fix the problem.

I'll remove the mpu board to do the battery holder swap, and post pictures front and back.

Well, more weirdness.

The new ribbon cables arrived today. I swapped them out, and now the game resets on every boot. I put the original cables in and the game still resets on every boot. So the problem likely isn't the cables. I might have introduced a new problem, but it seems more likely that I've exacerbated the existing issue.

Each of the batteries still measures at > 1.5V while in the holder. However, oddly enough, the voltage across all three batteries is 0. If I measure across for the first two batteries, I get a voltage of 3.0. If I measure across the middle and 3rd battery, I get a voltage of -1.5V. Seems like I've got some sort of strange short going on. Perhaps the metal dust in the machine has shorted something.

So, if the voltage across all three batteries is indeed 0, it's no surprise that settings aren't being saved. When the remote battery holder arrives, I'm going to pull the board and try wiping it down with rubbing alcohol to get it as clean as possible before installing the holder.

Yep, they are correct... Last week they measured 4.99 across all three. Pretty sure it's a short of some kind, probably in the battery traces.

No, measuring from the same points, but I did pull the board to take a look, and I'm guessing a disturbed something when I put it back in.

I'll be cutting off the holder this weekend and replacing to with a remote, and cleaning the board. We'll see what happens after that.

Alright... health issues had me down for a few weeks, but I finally got the battery holder cut off and replaced with a remote battery holder. I got a good constant voltage across my solder points, and the game seems to be retaining its settings now. Also realized that the country jumpers were in an undocumented configuration. Reset them to America2 (since most were cut already), and now everything seems to be working except for one of my flippers. I'll be starting a separate topic on that.

The flipper was easy... Blown fuse. Of course, the fuse for that flipper wasn't the one the manual claimed.