mhaaland
New member
Today, while repairing a Ms Pac board, I grabbed this little guy and found a customer's bad cable, made me think that it might be of interest to see here.
I started using this in 2006, I made 5 prototype PCBs, but only populated this one. It tests Ms. Pac 40 pin ribbon cables and 50 pin interconnect cables. The switch on the lower left is the ON/OFF switch, the lower right corner chooses the 'bank' of pins you want to test. Set to the left, it checks one every other wire in the ribbon cable, set it the other way to test only the other 1/2. The idea is that if you have an open wire, the LED for that wire won't light. If an LED lights on the side NOT being tested, you have a miscrimped connector. This is to catch shorted wires in a connector. For convenience, it is all powered off our JAMMA bench test jigs.
We use this on every Ms Pac ribbon cable and every DK/Galaga interconnect ribbon cable we build. I use it to test suspect ribbon cables on Ms. Pac pcbs also.
Keeps miscrimped cables from going out the door. And helps me detect suspected bad cables while doing repairs.
I started using this in 2006, I made 5 prototype PCBs, but only populated this one. It tests Ms. Pac 40 pin ribbon cables and 50 pin interconnect cables. The switch on the lower left is the ON/OFF switch, the lower right corner chooses the 'bank' of pins you want to test. Set to the left, it checks one every other wire in the ribbon cable, set it the other way to test only the other 1/2. The idea is that if you have an open wire, the LED for that wire won't light. If an LED lights on the side NOT being tested, you have a miscrimped connector. This is to catch shorted wires in a connector. For convenience, it is all powered off our JAMMA bench test jigs.
We use this on every Ms Pac ribbon cable and every DK/Galaga interconnect ribbon cable we build. I use it to test suspect ribbon cables on Ms. Pac pcbs also.
Keeps miscrimped cables from going out the door. And helps me detect suspected bad cables while doing repairs.




