Area 51/Maximum Force Resetting Problem

PacAttack13

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Just recently upgraded from a dedicated maximum force and put the duo maximum force/area 51 pcb and hard drive in their. Anyways, was having problems a month ago with the power supply so bought a brand new one and all was good. Put the duo pcb board and hard drive in and the game will reset at random times and go into watchdog mode. I have yet to check the voltage at the power supply and the board itself. I know hard drive games can be very touchy. So im thinking the power supply either needs adjusted or my hard drive is taking a shit?
 
on the subject of hard drive games, we have a few that we've been operating for 4 years ourselves, and they were in the "care" of a tech at their previous location that didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground (meaning all-original drives) and I haven't encountered any problems with them. I wouldn't entirely rule out a bad IDE cable however.

I can tell you from my Area 51 board that it was very finicky with voltage. your board should also have 2 indicator lights saying low voltage and high voltage I think. mine was adjusted accordingly and within a couple months started doing the blackouts. that's when I started getting very serious about cleaning my JAMMA edge connectors, and cleaning it alone reduced the amount of power loss to the board components very significantly.

I am also a huge proponent for metering your roms to ensure accurate checks of voltage getting to the components... metering at the power supply and JAMMA edge are huge no-no's.

I created this thread ( http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=215552 ) specifically for accurately testing your boards.

I've never worked with a Duo board before, but based on picture I saw the roms look to be mounted on the daughterboard, so you will only have to check one of those for voltage, cause the additional potential power loss would be to that daughterboard, assuming they're interlocked together. there looks to be an additional harness too, I don't know if that carries power or not.

at any rate, ensure that your roms are getting at least 5.10V and you should be mint. be sure to clean your JAMMA edge with a pencil eraser first, do each contact up and down, then do the entire edge side to side for maximum effectiveness, being certain you wipe away the eraser fragments off the board.

that should solve the puzzle, sorry for the tl;dr but I like to explain why this is all necessary :)
 
Installing a new power supply without checking the voltage is a very good way to ruin a perfectly good board..

In my opinion you are better off measuring TTL IC's rather than ROM's, 99% of the time you know where Vcc and ground are without looking at a datasheet.
 
Installing a new power supply without checking the voltage is a very good way to ruin a perfectly good board..

In my opinion you are better off measuring TTL IC's rather than ROM's, 99% of the time you know where Vcc and ground are without looking at a datasheet.

I do that if it's got oddball roms (large ones, or Sega ones), but I'm thinking an Area 51 has nothing more than ST 27C4001s on it.
 
on the subject of hard drive games, we have a few that we've been operating for 4 years ourselves, and they were in the "care" of a tech at their previous location that didn't know his ass from a hole in the ground (meaning all-original drives) and I haven't encountered any problems with them. I wouldn't entirely rule out a bad IDE cable however.

I can tell you from my Area 51 board that it was very finicky with voltage. your board should also have 2 indicator lights saying low voltage and high voltage I think. mine was adjusted accordingly and within a couple months started doing the blackouts. that's when I started getting very serious about cleaning my JAMMA edge connectors, and cleaning it alone reduced the amount of power loss to the board components very significantly.

I am also a huge proponent for metering your roms to ensure accurate checks of voltage getting to the components... metering at the power supply and JAMMA edge are huge no-no's.

I created this thread ( http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=215552 ) specifically for accurately testing your boards.

I've never worked with a Duo board before, but based on picture I saw the roms look to be mounted on the daughterboard, so you will only have to check one of those for voltage, cause the additional potential power loss would be to that daughterboard, assuming they're interlocked together. there looks to be an additional harness too, I don't know if that carries power or not.

at any rate, ensure that your roms are getting at least 5.10V and you should be mint. be sure to clean your JAMMA edge with a pencil eraser first, do each contact up and down, then do the entire edge side to side for maximum effectiveness, being certain you wipe away the eraser fragments off the board.

that should solve the puzzle, sorry for the tl;dr but I like to explain why this is all necessary :)
Good advice- My AREA 51 . Max force (with flash drive replaced HDD) was experiencing intermittent watchdog reset - voltages were fine- I cleaned the edged connector with an eraser and problem solved!
 
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