Joust ROM board ribbon cable question / issue

JODY

Active member
Joined
Apr 29, 2010
Messages
596
Reaction score
12
Location
Omaha, Nebraska
I bought a new ribbon cable from Bob Roberts. Just soldered it on and went to reconnect the board and the cable has a key/plug in one pin while the socket it plugs into has all 40 pins. Is one pin not used and I need to cut it off or is there an issue with the cable?
 
Last edited:
Bob said the pin needed to come out. I had to drill it out as it was flush with the end of the cable and appeared to be molded in place.

Board still did not work. Several pins on the ROM board that are connected to the ribbon cable showed as shorted. Could not find any soldering issues. Pulled the end off the ribbon cable and the shorts went away. The end of the cable was crimped wrong. The end connector is not reusable. One row of pins are messed up and the side clips broke when I was getting the end off. I will need to find a new end or resolder a whole new cable on. That was not fun....
 
It will be far easier to just get a new 40-pin connector and crimp it on instead of desoldering the other board end. Hopefully there's a "good" electronic store near you! ..or.. you can always try and vulture one off of an IDE cable.
 
I got some online. Never could find them at some of the larger electronics parts places online. Was easily found on Jameco's website. Installed it and all is well. I found it easy to make sure things were aligned prior to crimping by using a magnifying glass.

After crimping checked across each combination of wires with a meter just to make sure the crimp was good and nothing was shorted. If anyone buys a premade cable, I recommend doing this after soldering it on.

BTW, this has fixed all my weird Joust issues including resets, strange artifacts on the monitor, corrupt settings, lost high scores, etc. Sometimes it would not even boot up and once in awhile the LED would remain off, thus no error code displayed. Comes up every time now and has been solid as a rock since.
 
Last edited:
It would be nice if someone would do a video covering disconnecting, connecting and crimping of these cables and put it on Youtube. :D


Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.
 
I got some online. Never could find them at some of the larger electronics parts places online. Was easily found on Jameco's website. Installed it and all is well. I found it easy to make sure things were aligned prior to crimping by using a magnifying glass.

After crimping checked across each combination of wires with a meter just to make sure the crimp was good and nothing was shorted. If anyone buys a premade cable, I recommend doing this after soldering it on.

BTW, this has fixed all my weird Joust issues including resets, strange artifacts on the monitor, corrupt settings, lost high scores, etc. Sometimes it would not even boot up and once in awhile the LED would remain off, thus no error code displayed. Comes up every time now and has been solid as a rock since.

That is why I sometimes sound like a broken record asking people if they have tried recrimping the ROM connectors yet. People grab those by the wires and pull to get the connectors off. This just pulls the wires away from the IDC pins. It is amazing how many issues with Williams games can be fixed by recrimping or roplacing the ROM ribbon cable connectors.

ken
 
Back
Top Bottom