mikejmoffitt
Member
I have a Dig-Dug cabinet I've had for a while that I've been slowly working on for a few years (I got it back in 8th grade for $158 off of eBay with local pickup - wasn't the worst deal!).
Long story short, I have an extremely busted up Pac-Man PCB that I managed to get working. The previous owner had totally fried the original AC-DC circuitry, so of course I have it running on 5VDC natively. The old edge connector was in such poor shape that I, for testing's sake, used some fingerboard to give it a Dig-Dug compatible edge connector. I installed it in my machine to test, and Pac-Man worked fine. Pac-man isn't the focus.
When I put my Dig-Dug back in, I plugged it in, and checked that it was not backwards - I'm not a fool. I turned it on, and got video, and a faint hum, though the monitor was on (Sanyo EZY, a whole other trip). The power LED on dig-dug was on, but very faint...
Anyway, after about 10 seconds of this nothingness, I poke my head back around the back of the cabinet again to see if anything had changed and- WHOAMYGODWHATISTHAT - Smoke was billowing out! It isn't clear where it came from - it looked near either the bottom of the Dig-Dug PCB, or the top of the AR-II board. I of course shut the machine off immediately, and the smoke stopped quickly. After nervously fretting around and assuring my mother that "that smell is just what old arcade PCBs smell like, don't worry", I pulled out the PCB.
Visual inspection returned no anomalies - everything looks fine. I put it back in, VERY carefully making sure the connector was not out of alignment (what a mess that could cuase). With much fear, I powered it on. It then worked perfectly fine, just like it had before. This still has the original PSU and AR-II board with no mods, as well as the PCB, and it's been running fine (apart from the monitor that I had to re-cap and other things).
Should I be worried? Has running Pac-Man on the AR-II pissed it off somehow? I tied all of the 5V lines together so I don't expect the SENSE line was getting anything out of the ordinary. I'm just very freaked out and would like to know what I did wrong so I won't do it again!
Long story short, I have an extremely busted up Pac-Man PCB that I managed to get working. The previous owner had totally fried the original AC-DC circuitry, so of course I have it running on 5VDC natively. The old edge connector was in such poor shape that I, for testing's sake, used some fingerboard to give it a Dig-Dug compatible edge connector. I installed it in my machine to test, and Pac-Man worked fine. Pac-man isn't the focus.
When I put my Dig-Dug back in, I plugged it in, and checked that it was not backwards - I'm not a fool. I turned it on, and got video, and a faint hum, though the monitor was on (Sanyo EZY, a whole other trip). The power LED on dig-dug was on, but very faint...
Anyway, after about 10 seconds of this nothingness, I poke my head back around the back of the cabinet again to see if anything had changed and- WHOAMYGODWHATISTHAT - Smoke was billowing out! It isn't clear where it came from - it looked near either the bottom of the Dig-Dug PCB, or the top of the AR-II board. I of course shut the machine off immediately, and the smoke stopped quickly. After nervously fretting around and assuring my mother that "that smell is just what old arcade PCBs smell like, don't worry", I pulled out the PCB.
Visual inspection returned no anomalies - everything looks fine. I put it back in, VERY carefully making sure the connector was not out of alignment (what a mess that could cuase). With much fear, I powered it on. It then worked perfectly fine, just like it had before. This still has the original PSU and AR-II board with no mods, as well as the PCB, and it's been running fine (apart from the monitor that I had to re-cap and other things).
Should I be worried? Has running Pac-Man on the AR-II pissed it off somehow? I tied all of the 5V lines together so I don't expect the SENSE line was getting anything out of the ordinary. I'm just very freaked out and would like to know what I did wrong so I won't do it again!
