Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums

I've been trying to learn more and more about board repair and I've fixed several now. But I think that was a combination of luck and good resources vs my actual knowledge and skills.

I have better luck when I am up against a semi working board ie....a board that "works" but with problems. Now I have a board (pacman) that is in a constant reset loop (rest pin toggling every second). And I'm wondering what are the steps in general that you guys follow when approaching a board issue.

For example let say you have a board that won't boot. You have clock signal and the reset pin is high. Where do you go then? Check address lines and data I/O? What if you find one stuck high or low? How do you know that it's NOT supposed to be high or low?

Now what if you have a board like mine that has something tripping a reset? Do you follow the same steps as above? Would you treat this problem differently?

I know to check things like verifying roms and simple things like swapping known good components like cpu and ram.

I'm asking general questions because I want to learn instead of ....can someone help me fix my pacman.......what I have a problem with is so many repair logs I have read will say things like.

Board dead.
Reseated all chips
replaced bad 74ls367 @ 5L
board now works

well how did you come to that conclusion? How did you get clued into checking that specific chip?

I understand schematics and how to read them I just don't fully understand what I should expect to see vs what I'm actually seeing.

I know this is a very broad spectrum question and I know a lot of this will just come with experience but I need help gaining said experience.