area 51 :(

cadillacman

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just picked up a rough pos area 51... been in a basement, cab smells of mold.. board had a light oxidation all over it.

when i looked at it , on powerup youd hear the "bing" sound they make on powerup, then it would just sit at a bright blank screen..



I got it home, rechecked it. i reseated some connestors. It Booted, no bing no sound at all but booted up and played fine otherwise. I found that the audio ic area was soaking wet from snow melt due to the move so i powered down and dried it out immeadiately.

I rechecked some connectors to try to fix the sound, now its back to no bing no sound and blank screen.. Voltages have been checked and good.

I tried the board in my max force cab with same result- no sound no bing no video nada..

THe hard drive light is solid on powerup then after awile it will flicker randomly. I even went as far as making sure the roms on the top board have good 5v...


I removed chips and applied "deoxit" to all sockets, reinserted chips with same result. Even treated the enitire board including the 2 board sandwich connector. I have even tried a new board-to-hd "ide" cable with same result ... wtf...


THe hd is noisy as hell, will a bad hd cause no bootup and a blank screen? Im thinking the cold trip back made the hd work for a short ammount of time.

I figured it would at least boot and say "no hard drive" or something like that...


whatcha think?

Im effed arent i? Its bad enough while moving this converted pos it started falling apart...


Easy chrtistmas flip this is not! LOL thats what i get i suppose.

im afraid powering up with the board bieng wet cooked something...
 
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its the one that was on rockford craigs...

its bad enough it took my old man and me about a hour to get it out of the house. the seller was lazy and absoultely no help at all, once we got it outside the house the seller left leaving us to load it by ourselves too.. Juast a bad deal all the way around.. at least i have a working 25" k7000 monitor... but does need a fly(cracked)
 
would a shorted audio ic cause the board not to boot?

ive noticed on powerup the speakers pop a little then i get a flash on the screen but back to blank... every once in a while ill get solid red, green, or blue but goes right back to blank.

EDIT REMOVED AND SAME NO BOOTY


this sux...
 
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I had the same thing happen on my area51/max force. I ordered a new hard drive, still happened. I then increased the 5v and it worked fine. When the problem happened sometimes it would load and then quit, sometimes I would get the blank screen, and othertimes I would get the watchdog screen.
 
If you flex the board you'll end up popping legs loose on the surface mount ICs. The board is pretty fragile.
 
yeah ive come to the conclusion that im juast totallt screwed..

also the top board has a led, and it does not light....does that mean anything?
 
have you tried putting the board in test mode and seeing if anything comes up? I seem to remember when I got my board it would come up as a black screen because the hard drive was not spinning up. I could however put the game in test mode and text would come up and I could run all tests. Of course the test mode on this game is junk. My hard drive was dead yet according to test mode it was fine. A new hard drive and I was good to go.
 
I'm suprised no one has mentioned dowloading the CHD for MAME and then using CHDMAN to create a new drive. Not sure if that'll fix your other issues but it'll fix one of them ;)
 
UPDATE- SHES PARTIALLZY WORKING


I found one bad solder connection on the cpu, carefully resoldered.

SHe boots up in test, all checks ok except hard drive.

I still have no sound, just crackly sound even during volume adjustment so something else is going on there(hopefully bad audio ic)


anybody have a cheap working area 51 drive?
 
haven't checked in some time but there used to be a guy on ebay that sold these for $25-40 shipped and would guarantee them for a year.
 
yeah thats the arcade servcices dude hes got the area 51/max force kit for $50+8 shipping.... might have to go that route unless topless z can hook a brotha up! foind a tube of 10 audio ics for $20 shipped... but damn i hate to do all of this and still have some other issue.. i think ill hold off a few days and see if somebody can produce a working board for me on the cheap...
 
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