day TWO work on my OMEGA RACE

vintagegamer

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Today I was determined to figure out why the top lights behind the marquee weren't lighting on this game, along with the quarter slots (seeing lit quarter slots are like seeing tits for me with these things)-

Ken Layton and some others told me that if there were no coin door lights, it was most likely a 12V fuse issue. I thought I'd tested all of the fuses when I got the game home, but somehow I managed to miss the one in the linear PS (either that or I tested it and it blew the first time I powered this thing up). Nevertheless, the fuse in the PS was blown, and it's a 3/8 Amp slow blow fuse. I ran up to the local HD and since this was just to get lights working, I just bought the 1/2 Amp slow blow to do my tests (instead of combing all of the local Radio Shacks to find the other one and wasting the few hours I had where I could work on the game).

I came home, switched out the fuse, powered up the game and.......... no change. Hit the new fuse with the tester and it was blown ("slow" blow my ass LOL). There were only 2 fuses in the pack, so rather than try the same combo again, I popped in an extra power supply that I had that met the criteria for the machine, and put the 2nd new fuse in it. I wired everything up, flipped the switch and................. I had a marquee and nice tits! I mean, quarter lights! :D I was ecstatic. The funny thing is, the spare PS I had was one that I'd won on an auction 2 years ago, and it was labeled a TRON PS. But when I got it, it was the wrong one. I just threw it in my spare parts bin in the event that I might need it for another game some day, and today just happened to be that day! I LOVE IT WHEN A PLAN COMES TOGETHER (name the TV show that comes from)..

That's today's update! Stay tuned for more! I attached a pic but I can never get good pics because my flash always goes off. :(


Day ONE thread:

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=114982
 

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I guess this will be a good thread to use to log my work to-date on my Omega Race. Tonight I dug it out of its slumber, and pulled the board out that was in it that I've been trying to use to resurrect it with. I'll try to get a pic of the board tomorrow so that others can see it.

I brought the board in the house tonight to check continuity on all of the caps, and to see what else I could spot on it that might be giving it grief. The battery is removed from it, but to complete the circuit someone's really rigged the board up quite a bit. I resoldered one spot where their work had come apart.

I also noticed that 2 IC's have been removed from the board (I'm guessing this was a parts board for someone). There are also some sockets that are missing chips (I'm guessing 5 in total, going from memory).

I cleaned up the board with some alcohol, let it dry, and looked it over again. There were quite a few 3-legged components where 2 of the legs were either touching one another, or they were making contact with the board itself, so I bent them upright and made sure the legs weren't touching. They weren't power transistors, they are the components which look like those War of the Worlds creatures from Spielberg's reboot. I am tired while typing right now, so I can't remember what their formal names are. Nonetheless I bent them away from the board to help improve its chances of new life.

I put the board back in the game, and powered up the game. The LED on the board did not come on, but I noticed the fuse on the PS wasn't glowing orange as it had done in the past. Everything else light-wise on the front of the game was working so, I figured maybe I'd helped resolve the fuse-blowing issues I'd had in the past when troubleshooting this game. Spot killer was still on on the deflection board though. I haven't looked in the HV cage yet to see its condition.

I put a new fuse in the PS board just to make sure that my theory about improving the board proved true, but it didn't. I guess the slo-blow that was in the PS board already had been damaged during prior work on the game, because upon putting a new fuse in and powering the game up, the fuse slowly went orange once again. I can say though that it didn't seem like it happened right away, as I remember happening in the past. So hopefully I'm making 'some' progress. I have a 2nd OR board that has the 2 missing IC's on it, so I'm going to do some swap surgery this week and see if that has any impact on the board's condition or not. Right now I'm basically just grabbing at straws, but you've gotta start somewhere, right?

I also want to note that the LED's on the control panel were not lighting up, and moving the test switch to 'on' did nothing either. She's not giving much to go off of, is she....

Well, that's it for tonight's OR update.. More to come.
 
Good luck with the game, my Omega Race has always had issues. I've given it new PCB caps, new power brick caps, new linear power supply caps, ect. My latest parts purchase for it goes in the linear power supply: a TIPS and some side mounted transistors. The 12V marquee and coin door lights have never worked on mine. Thankfully it's almost always been playable, so I can take these things in stride. Some games are a money dump and this one is mine. Good thing the game is aces though :) I think there is a reason a cockpit went for $600+ in these economic times....at least I tell myself that!
 
Okay KLOV, you got me motivated to swap in my shot-in-the-dark new parts for my own Omega Race power supply board. No change on the 12V, nothing adjusts. Maybe a bad pot? Omega Race, you win. Sometimes you've got to let the game do what it wants to do, right?

I found out first hand that a bad linear power supply board can cause monitor issues with this game relating to the image zooming out and being very unstable (with retrace lines too). I've always heard this is related to the inline anode cup diode, but it's not the case with Omega Race.

Oh well, at least I can play the darned thing. That's what counts :)

Good luck with the game, I'll keep an eye on this thread and try to help a fellow Omega Race owner.

<it may be 1:30am talking, but I swear the monitor is slightly more stable after the new parts>
 
Thanks guys for the support. I just hope I've picked the better board of the 2 to work with. I had a tough time choosing and even as I type this post I'm still contemplating jumping back to the alternate board since it has no components removed from it already. But that also means the orig batt is still on there too. If I remove it, does a jumper need to be soldered in its place? If I remember correctly, this game has the batt only to retain high scores, right?
 
If I remove it, does a jumper need to be soldered in its place? If I remember correctly, this game has the batt only to retain high scores, right?

That's all the battery was originally intended to do, yes!
 
OK upon removing the batt from board 'b' (for bad), I found quite a bit of damage. Will upload a pic shortly. I'm glad I went with the other board, board 'a', to try to save the game with. I am now going to remove the chips from 5b and 5c on the 'b' board, as my 'a' board has those chips missing completely. That must be a problem area for this game bc the chips at that location on my board 'b' appear to be newer than the chips around them.
 
The chips at locations 5b and 5c are giving me some trouble coming out. They read '8041' on the top. Would it just be better to buy new ones? Also, any chance that their absence from the board would make the fuse on the linear ps burn up?
 
The chips at locations 5b and 5c are giving me some trouble coming out. They read '8041' on the top. Would it just be better to buy new ones? Also, any chance that their absence from the board would make the fuse on the linear ps burn up?

Whoops- boy do I have alot to learn. The chips are at B5 and C5, and the chip type is AD561J, not 8041.

So, I guess my next step is to see if I can locate 2 of these babies.
 
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Wooo those are the DACs...gonna be a little pricey I think, try to keep those in one piece!

As for your fuse blowing problem...get a magnifying glass, and look over the board REALLY REALLY REALLY well. Look at all the pins pin the chips, look for scratches where a trace got smeared over to another trace, etc.

Chances are the fuse blowing is a short somewhere, I wouldn't bother replacing any empty chip sockets until the fuse stops blowing. You have to be careful because depending on the short you don't want all your 5v chips getting 12v! I've seen that!
 
Interesting.. those are the DAC chips (and also 14 clams a piece!!).. maybe I will try to get them out of the current board 'b' after all! :D The only problem is, they are soldered on the top of the board as well as the bottom, and I can't seem to get the solder off enough to remove them. I have tried using both my solder sucker and soldering braid, but not doing very well with it.

Any tips?
 
Wooo those are the DACs...gonna be a little pricey I think, try to keep those in one piece!

As for your fuse blowing problem...get a magnifying glass, and look over the board REALLY REALLY REALLY well. Look at all the pins pin the chips, look for scratches where a trace got smeared over to another trace, etc.

Chances are the fuse blowing is a short somewhere, I wouldn't bother replacing any empty chip sockets until the fuse stops blowing. You have to be careful because depending on the short you don't want all your 5v chips getting 12v! I've seen that!

You must have been posting at the same time as I was- reading your reply now :D
 
On the top, take your solder braid and pull out some slack. Lay the braid sideways across the pins, then use the soldering iron to tuck the braid into the joint, and gentle go across with the soldering iron to absorb all the solder across the top.

Another trick with braid, is to use a pair of side cutters and slightly scrap the braid before you use it, to get off the coating that protects the braid on the roll.
 
After 700 degrees and 2 hrs of fighting, the 2 dac's are still not off of board 'b'. I'm starting to think you have to be a 9th level cleric to pull off the magic that's required for this..
 
I'm going to tinker some more on this game tonight. I've noticed up where the battery 'used' to be on the board that I'm trying to save, someone's created a homemade jumper wire going around the edge of the board, and where the positive terminal of the batt was, they have a diode (I think it's one anyway) going from another component on the board to that hole. It's totally rigged up. Should I assume this was done to try to keep the high score functionality alive even without a battery in place? Anyone heard of a setup like this before? The jumper wire I'm referring to is red, and can be seen in the attached photo of the board (in next post)
 
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