Gauntlet Dark Legacy not booting

[mfrohs]

Hey everyone, this is my first repair question so hopefully I get this right.

I have the GDL boards and hard drive that shows version 2.4 on a sticker. When I power it up, according to the LED's, the power is OK on all boards. The issues that are clear to me are:
1. The hard drive LED (LED2 on CPU board) is off, but if I unplug the drive the light is solid green. Off means "not in use", solid green means "Locked up".
2. LED1 on the I/O board is solid green. According to the manual that means "S I/O Board locked up".
3. LED8 (Audio Activity) is solid yellow, indicating "Locked up".

Some background on my setup is that I'm using it in a Cyberball cabinet that is running a midway board with NBA Hangtime. It has the original monitors (A48ABK05X) that I believe are K7000's, and one is not in use at the moment (that's a whole other issue). I have the jamma harness, player 3 and player 4 connectors currently hooked up, and the coin door, gun 1 and gun 2 connectors not hooked up.

I think I have the same symptoms as this thread, http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=71736. The LED that should go through the start sequence shows an 8, and once had a 0.

Any help would be greatly appreciated. I'm new to this so I'm just sort of fumbling through it. My main goal is to not break anything!

 

[Mitsurugi-w]

First thing to check is the voltages. If they are ok then you probably need a hard drive. Does anything at all come up on screen?

 

[mfrohs]

First thing to check is the voltages. If they are ok then you probably need a hard drive. Does anything at all come up on screen?

Hey thanks for the reply! The voltages look OK, I'm seeing 5.09v and 12.25v. Nothing comes up at all on the screen, it just stays black. I've tried the test switch but still nothing.

I have a USB to IDE/SATA adapter I use to test hard drives for my job, and I couldn't get this drive to show up on the computer or show any activity at all for that matter. It powers up but that's about it. I'm in the process of downloading the GDL 2.4 CHD from this link http://edgeemu.net/details-33999.htm so maybe I'll dump that on a different drive when it's done.

 

[mfrohs]

I made a new hard drive and hooked it up, but the drive will only power on when the IDE cable is detached. If it matters I had an unpartitioned drive that I put the image on, would it be better to format it with fat or something first?

 

[demogo]

I made a new hard drive and hooked it up, but the drive will only power on when the IDE cable is detached. If it matters I had an unpartitioned drive that I put the image on, would it be better to format it with fat or something first?

CHDMAN takes care of the formatting, I believe.

Does the LED that counts up during start ever have anything on it other than 8? What does it start at? What does it end at? How does it change?

Is this a GDL conversion kit or an original GDL boardset?

Does the LED that counts during start change its behavior with the hard drive unplugged?

What are your dip-switches set to?

 

[mfrohs]

It starts out at 8 and just stays there indefinitely. I am positive I saw a 0 at one point after it had sat for a while, but I was changing jumper settings and dip switches quite a bit at the time so I can't remember what the circumstances were.

I really don't know if it's a conversion kit or not. I got it off of ebay and it had no description or documentation.

The LED stays at 8 with or without the hard drive plugged in, and the hard drive does not spin up if the IDE cable is plugged in.

Dipswitches U12 SW1 and SW4 are on, the rest of U12 and all of U13 are off. These were the settings it had when I first got the board, with the exception of U12 SW3. I moved it to off because I am using 8-way joysticks.


I was just looking at the ebay picture of the board and thinking about the way I have it mounted now. I wasn't able to get the original metal mounting plate, so I used wood to mount the boards to. Did these boards need that metal plate for grounding? I can't find any info about it, but I suppose it could be an issue.

 

[demogo]

Was it claimed to be working when sold on Ebay?

I don't think you have to have the metal board but I'm not 100% sure. I believe I've seen installations w/o the metal boards before and people weren't complaining about the issues you're relating.

Do you have the cooling fans blowing on it? Just curious.

 

[incrediblegamez]

Make sure the IDE cable is in the right orientation. Mine did this as well and i went as far as to get a new video card for it. After carefully looking at it, the IDE cable was in wrong.

 

[mfrohs]

It was claimed that the board was pulled from a working machine, and I sort of get the feeling it should be working. I don't have any fans on it at the moment.

Thanks for the suggestions, I saw your thread earlier and made sure to check the IDE cable. I tried a couple different cables and changed directions on it just to see what happened. When the orientation was correct the hard drive LED shows the drive is "not in use"l, but when it was reversed the LED would show the drive was locked up. The drive didn't boot in either case.

 

[demogo]

Your boards will burn up without fans on them. I wouldn't run them this way for very long or you'll definitely be replacing them.

Does anything change with the p3 and p4 controls disconnected? Is it labeled p3 and p4 on the board?

 

[mfrohs]

Ok, I was looking at the pictures of the fans they started with and it looks like there's one directly above the video card heat sinks and one blowing across the cpu board. Can anyone confirm that for me?

I have the P3 and P4 controls disconnected right now. I've tried with and without but I get no change. Also I see an audio line in and line out connector, can anyone tell me what that's for? So just for info purposes, I only have the jamma harness and IDE cables connected right now.

 

[mecha]

DL was Vegas, right? if it's like my Sportstation, there should be about 4 or 5 fans. lol of course mine shipped with the entire metal mounting cage, so your results may vary.

I don't know if the Vegas hardware has a shutdown feature if it overheats. I would think the hardware won't get hot enough to do that if there were no fans plugged in though, at least not in the time span it takes to boot up.

if you didn't use CHDMAN to make up your new hard drive, then you didn't do that right... that's ok though, that's an easy fix. I'm guessing the drive controller on the game board isn't crazy enough to mess a drive up if the IDE cable is plugged in backwards.

there's a good tutorial here http://www.revisionx.com/kiproject/chdman.html on how to back up or write MAME .CHD images to hard drives. you'll need to know how to do this if you have hard disk based games like these.

if your board doesn't have the original fans then you'll have to devise your own cooling solution for this.

 

[mfrohs]

Hm yeah it doesn't seem that anything is getting very hot, and I'm not running it for more than 30 seconds or so for now. I have a ton of computer case fans I can use to cool everything, do you think it would be better to put them running across the boards or directed down into them?

I did use CHDMAN for the 2nd hard drive, but it pretty much acts the same as the original.

Do you think it could it be one of the pins on the connector between the CPU and I/O boards or maybe on the video card? I used a soft toothbrush with some windex on the board, and then used a pencil eraser on the jamma connector. They usually seem to work pretty well. If not the connectors there maybe one of the rom chips? I don't have enough experience to know what the symptoms would be in that case.

 

[mecha]

interesting. just out of curiosity, did you try replacing the IDE cable?

I never took the boardset apart on my Sportstation, like I said, it came shipped in the metal cage, so it was a simple drop-in job (after swapping the old Seattle mounting panel out) but you could try reseating the different boards. I think one's a video, another is an I/O, and then there's the main board.

as far as roms, there aren't many on this one. all the software is on the hard drive, hence why it won't give you anything at all. it's not like Killer Instinct in this case where the game code and sound are on roms, it's seriously a security chip and a boot chip on the Seattle and Vegas boardsets, the hard drive houses the rest.

I've heard stories about the MAME CHDs not matching up with certain revisions of the Sportstation board, not sure if GDL 2.4 was the newest one and the most common disk image available online. maybe you could try reseating the boot rom though. the security one will be a smaller one, and the boot one will be a normal sized IC. if that doesn't help then uh... well, where's ToplessZ when you need him?

 

[mfrohs]

Oh sorry I missed that above, yeah it is a Vegas 7-7-7 board. I did try a couple different IDE cables, and I ran a new HD power cable directly from the power supply instead of the on board one also.

So that's pretty normal then if you get absolutely nothing for it to be the hard drive? I think I need to take some pictures for you guys. I really, really appreciate all this help so I'm going to do my best to make this easier to troubleshoot.

Is that red circle in the first picture supposed to be a blank?

 

[mecha]

the IC with the detailed white label is the security rom. the IC with the EPROM window is the boot rom.

the empty socket, I'm not entirely sure. I'm not too familiar with these. have to be mindful that the Atari/Midway Vegas was used in a few different games, and it's modular so it's normal for the different games to have some things and some to not have some things I guess.

I'll see if I can find a picture of a Vegas board lol

I'm not at our arcade yet, so I can't even check our Road Burners or my Sportstation.

http://www.system16.com/boards/war_large.jpg

QUICK EDIT: it's empty in that picture, so that's good I guess

ANOTHER EDIT: there's 3 roms, the one that's by the diagnostic code (the number 0-8 thing) is the boot rom. the one that's near the security rom is the sound rom... forgot that these had revisions for the sound driver software.

you can also see how the fans are arranged here. looks like one blows directly on the video card, another blows towards the metal heatsinks, and the 3rd fan I believe is an exhaust fan. I run my Sportstation without the cage cover... I wonder if that's better or if it messes up the airflow arrangement. lol

 

[Mitsurugi-w]

My first Vegas set I had just had a blank screen. In my case it turned out that the CPU was bad and it happens quite a lot on these. Others have said there's was a bad video card. I don't think it boots if the video card is bad either.

 

[mfrohs]

Yeah that's a good picture to emulate thanks. So I think the only difference between that board and mine are the small board in the upper left. Would a bad video cable cause that?

Maybe it is a pin or chip or something... I don't know what else to try.

 

[CMAC]

If you are sure the IDE cable is plugged in correctly on both ends then check the drive jumper. Probably should be Master or cable select - can't hurt to check.

 

[mfrohs]

Hah I'm going to feel stupid if I somehow screwed up the cable, I'll check again. Also I believe both drives I tried were set as master, I'll try cable select.