Oscilliscope

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So I have one now and have been doing a little bit of tinkering. Any good videos of somebody working on an arcade board with one? See a few vids of people on other things but its not clicking and hoping a walk through would make it stick. Right now its just sitting pretty on my desk :(
 
An oscilloscope is next to useless without basic digital & analog electronics knowledge. If you don't know what that signal should be doing, you're not going to realise if theres anything wrong with it when you look at it with the scope.
 
Yeah unless you are repairing monitor, power or clock circuits, your time and money are best spent leaning digital logic and buying digital logic tools.

Logic probe is useful, fluke 9010a is phoenmenal, and if you can get a cheap logical analyzer that would be cool ( I don't have one yet haven't needed it but would not mind having :)
 
Logic probe and logic comparitor are probably the basic tools to have. Understanding digital logic well enough to understand what the circuit is supposed to to is THE most valuable tool. I found the 9010 was useful, but only to test RAM and ROM. Its next to worthless on a vector board, although fixing a stack of battlezone boards with bad roms & rams went alot faster with it..
 
But if the RAM and ROM test good, you're *technically* also testing all the data and address busses, buffers/drivers, mux's and anything else between the rams/roms and the CPU. It can test memory mapped inputs, and a bunch of other stuff.
 
But if the RAM and ROM test good, you're *technically* also testing all the data and address busses, buffers/drivers, mux's and anything else between the rams/roms and the CPU. It can test memory mapped inputs, and a bunch of other stuff.

I don't need one often but I need one for a Galaxian pcb that is doggin'. Not sure exactly what it is but that Fluke would tell me something.
 
But if the RAM and ROM test good, you're *technically* also testing all the data and address busses, buffers/drivers, mux's and anything else between the rams/roms and the CPU. It can test memory mapped inputs, and a bunch of other stuff.

Yeah for what I found at least doing raster Ataris 90% of the issues I find are found by the fluke, whether that be a bad clock or errors somewhere in the address and data circuits.

I love it because it narrows down all this problems in minutes.
 
Meh. I use a 'scope as my primary probing tool. It sits on the workbench, so I only really use a logic probe when away from the bench. I kinda like the more detailed view of what's happening... but to be honest, most cases when you find a dead output, it'd look just as dead with a logic probe.

Thing about an oscilloscope is, it's not any sort of "magic" diagnosis machine (like the Fluke 9010 sort of is). A scope is nothing but a high-speed (low accuracy) voltmeter. It draws a graph of the voltage vs time at the point you probe (or two points, if you have a dual trace scope)... that's it! It's up to you to determine what that means. As others have mentioned, a scope if essentially useless without at least basic knowledge of electronics, and better still understanding of the schematics; or at the very least, information about the specific component being probed.

If you haven't read "The Book" at Atari, do that first.
 
Meh. I use a 'scope as my primary probing tool. It sits on the workbench, so I only really use a logic probe when away from the bench. I kinda like the more detailed view of what's happening... but to be honest, most cases when you find a dead output, it'd look just as dead with a logic probe.

Thing about an oscilloscope is, it's not any sort of "magic" diagnosis machine (like the Fluke 9010 sort of is). A scope is nothing but a high-speed (low accuracy) voltmeter. It draws a graph of the voltage vs time at the point you probe (or two points, if you have a dual trace scope)... that's it! It's up to you to determine what that means. As others have mentioned, a scope if essentially useless without at least basic knowledge of electronics, and better still understanding of the schematics; or at the very least, information about the specific component being probed.

If you haven't read "The Book" at Atari, do that first.

here is a post from some time ago that has some other links you should have.

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showpost.php?p=2214988&postcount=12
 
figured I'd chime in a little. Most of what I use mine for is Monitor repairs, and auido. Although as many have stated a logic probe and digital logic understanding is the most useful thing to have or know. However, if you don't have a logic probe you can use your O'scope to check the many TTL IC's. It depends on your model, probe and settings available. This may not have helped much, but once you get to understand your O' scope you can begin to expand the usefullness of it.
 
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