Saturday July 27, 2024


Smart Ball Skeeball - Update on Audio
  Posted by: AceBHound on Dec 5th, 2011 6:57 PM
No dice on the power amp or pre-amp being the issue on the Smart Ball alley. Still have the same issue where turning the volume pot makes an ever so slight noise but other than that no sound at all and no loud hum or anything like on some power amps of older pinball machines. Maybe the amp section on this Smart Ball is quieter even at high volume if no sound is being produced. The hunt continues..

I may pull the board over the winter and try diagnosing it on the bench. Not entirely sure it'll boot up without the driver board connected but if not I'll grab the driver board and display and put them on the bench as well. The DMD display is powered off the 12v supply -- would just need to verify my ATX "bench power supply" could handle the load.

In other news, spent most of last weekend organizing a bunch of arcade/pinball boards. Also worked some more with this Hot Hand pinball I thought had a ghost in it -- the MPU would boot most of the time but sometimes stop after the 4th or 5th flash and spin the large flipper at the top of the machine. Powering off/on again and it would boot correctly. Thought it was the MPU cause it had some other weird issues prior to that.. cleaned up battery corrosion, had a small hairline piece of solder shorting out the 5101 RAM and causing board issues.. then found a bad small cap on one of the switch matrix outputs that was causing it to boot right into self service mode. Anyway.. fast forward a few months and buckled down over the weekend to sort it out -- turns out the remaining "ghost" is the SB-100 sound board. When the SB-100 is connected the board it doesn't boot up consistently. Sure it might make it 10x or 15x without an issue, or it might mess up 5 out of 10x. Without it connected I probably tried turning it on and off 30x on several occasions and had no problems at all. May be a timing thing.. I'd love to figure it out, but the nice thing is my other Hot Hand messes up the same way, just not as frequent.



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