my Ms. Pac sings once again!!

vintagegamer

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My Ms. Pac has been without sound for probably almost 3 months now. It's made me insane. You would hear sound getting to the speaker, but it basically sounded like when you take a cassette tape and put it on fast forward, and you can hear all that blipping but no actual intelligible "sound". I've had offers to take the board out and send it to fellow KLOVers for repair (thanks to all btw), but the problem is my Ms. Pac came from Coney Island, and the wiring inside is rigged up worse than Uncle Jesse's CB radio. I've been afraid that if I took it out, I'd never be able to get it working again in the cab once it was "fixed".

Tonight I took some time to check things out, and found that there is a switcher in there that IS in fact live (I wasn't sure at the time that I first got it), and the wiring is rigged into the wiring that goes to the edge connector for the board. Funny thing is, while I was poking around in there, I found that the wires for the 12V and 5V connections on the switcher were in there with no connector piece on the edge of the wire (just jammed in under the screw), and the screws themselves weren't even tightened down. Even worse, the knob on the switcher had the output voltage up to 13.4V. I immediately bumped that down, got proper connectors to put on the screws, and cranked everything down.

And now for the sound.. I'd been looking around on the web trying to find some info on what could potentially cause the sound to go out. There were 2 RAM chips at 2K and 2L that could go bad, and a chip at 1N, plus some other possibilities. Well, I went and looked on my board and all of those chips were soldered on- but the one at 1M is a socketed chip. For giggles I popped the chip and reseated it, and powered up the machine.. DING DING!!! She has sound again!! Playing a Ms. Pac with no sound is like going to the dentist.. IT SUCKS!!!

Hopefully this helps others out there with Ms. Pac sound issues.
 
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