Mahtomedi, MN
Update from my previous post:
http://pinside.com/pinball/forum/topic/after-cleaning-battery-corrosion-from-tz-wpc-odd-behavior-at-startup
Ok that was really challenging but I got it working!!! The battery corrosion was worse than I realized when I cleaned the MPU board the first time. The green goobers were all over the legs of the ICs and who knows where else, so I bought a new board with remote battery holder from Mad Amusements for $175 which I thought was an excellent deal. Heck they even threw in some gummy candies.
I put new terminals and connectors on the J212 and J206/7, pulled our ROM and CPU chips from the old board and installed them on the new one. When I turned it on the test report had "Ground Short to Rows 1,2,3,4,6,7,8". I quickly realized that I plugged the J204 ribbon cable backwards!!!!!(Yes I agree. I'm a dumbass.) Got really lucky I think because when I tried it again, it seemed to be working fine except when I battled the Power for the first time the left magnet didn't work. Then realized that the Spiral magnets were dead too. After scouring the machine for some mystical problem for hours, it occurred to me to check the fuses. Duh. Yep the fuse blew. Also found that somebody put in some random fuses where they didn't belong. One was a 20 amp in place of a 3 amp! I replaced them and she's working like a champ. Checking the fuses is now officially at the top of my troubleshooting checklist.
On a side note, there were other problems on the MPU board that we didn't realize. So far I've noticed that playfield lights flash more frequently, whereas before they were mostly on or off. The DMD doesn't have those bleeding pixels like before, and the thing that is really cool to me is that loud burping noise it made when shutting it off... Gone.... Sweet.
