Exidy Pepper II Repaired - Need a comparison to known working hardware

Rommager

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Exidy Pepper II Repaired - Need a comparison to known working hardware

Hello all,

I recently acquired Pepper II in non-working shape, and after a some cleaning the connections on the PCB, the game came up, but still had a few graphic glitches and an intermittent audio communication error. When looking, I found that some genius decided it would improve things if they soldered the boards together at the interconnects, thus making it impossible to separate the boards. Needless to say, I had to cut off the board interconnects and replace them with .156 right angle connectors. Also, while I was at it, I replaced all electrolytic caps on the PCB and cleaned and reseated all the socketed chips. The game seems to be 100% now. :)

Here's the thing, there's a couple differences between MAME and the original hardware. I need to figure out if there is something else that is a problem, or if it's just one of those little differences in emulation versus the real thing.

First, when you first power on the game, Pepper appears in white at the bottom center of the screen, but on the original hardware, he always appears in white in a random screen location. When he turns yellow, he appears back at the lower center of the screen.

Second, some of the sound effects are distinctly different than in MAME. Specifically, the sound when Pepper eats the roaming eyes it much higher pitched - it almost sounds like the same sound effects in Atari 2600 pac man.

Can someone else with a Pepper II advise if they have the same differences on their hardware?

Thanks!

Sean
 
I was reading through the manual today and it says there are dipswitch settings that "strip down" the music and sound effects. Maybe check the manual for those dipswitch settings.

Good luck. I'm trying to hunt down my audio communications error right now...
 
I was reading through the manual today and it says there are dipswitch settings that "strip down" the music and sound effects. Maybe check the manual for those dipswitch settings.

Good luck. I'm trying to hunt down my audio communications error right now...

Almost all problems with audio communication errors occur with the board interconnects. I replaced the interconnects with new .156 headers and wire and have no more audio communication errors. If you are interested in seeing what I did, I believe I still have a video I shot.
 
at least for the sounds, here's a good youtube video showing the gameplay:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEtSYFW-qek

Hey, awesome! Sounds like in this video the machine is missing some sound effects that my cabinet has, but the prior post said the dip settings allows some sound effects to be turned off, but other than that, my machine sounds exactly like the one in the video. :D If you have played it in MAME, you can easily hear the sound effects are a little different sounding in MAME. Must just be one of those cases where MAME is a little different than an original machine.
 
I was just having "Audio Communication Errors". I reseated all the chips in the "B" column of the audio board. Now everything works perfectly.
 
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