Max Force Duo / Site 4

yaggy

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Hi - I've had Area 51 and Max Force machines in the past and ran them without a problem, but now I have one A51/MF Duo and two Site 4 boards, none of which work.

Figured it was their hard drives, so I did the CHDMAN.exe trick and imaged myself up a few new ones and even set the jumpers to Master.

But it has not changed the situation - these boards power up to a blank screen.
They beep once (maybe that was only the Site 4 boards), as if going through the
power-on self test, and broadcast a loud hiss, like an amplifier turned up all the
way with no signal, followed by inference from the disk spinning up and running.

So I'm just wondering, does anyone know what this is symptomatic of?
Is this disk still at issue? Should I see anything on the monitor?
I'm a reasonably good tech, otherwise, but these have me stumped.

Thanks.
 
site 4's will beep when booting the bios..like an older computer. the boards are commonly plagued with problems though. if it beeps and nothing is on the screen then the ram is good and its most likely a cpu issue. where at in pa are you?

dual will boot without a drive to an atari boot screen. theres something else going on if it doesnt do this.
 
i'm north of philly - the other pennsylvania!

cpu issue on both site 4 boards? crazy. the boards are so basic, too.

yeah the duo does nothing either - no boot screen of any kind.

any hope for these? they sure seem like good games and worth
a few dollars, it'd be a shame to give up on them.



site 4's will beep when booting the bios..like an older computer. the boards are commonly plagued with problems though. if it beeps and nothing is on the screen then the ram is good and its most likely a cpu issue. where at in pa are you?

dual will boot without a drive to an atari boot screen. theres something else going on if it doesnt do this.
 
The site4 boards beep when booting because they really are just special PC boards. You can remove the jammit board and plug a regular computer monitor into the board to see if its booting. If it does, then I'd start looking at the power connections on the jammit board. I think there's also jumpers on the jammit board to denote what type of sync its using so that could be why your not getting video on some monitors.

You can also use the keyboard/mouse plugs to make sure the cf card or hd is being detected properly.

If the motherboard doesn't boot...check the fan on the CPU, reseat the memory simms and also remove the watchdog jumper that goes between the motherboard side and the jammit side.
 
Site 4 boards are also plagued with bad caps. They might POST but wont produce an image depending on which caps are bad.
 
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