Sorry but, Another Ms. Pac thread...

Alf

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So I have been researching this and there are just so many threads with different fixes for similar problems but nothing that totally satisfies me.

So here's the deal. I grabbed another Ms. Pac. This one is a real beaut with the nicest side art I have seen in person. It's very vivid and there is no fading at all. The game worked very well and I got a great deal. I got it home and on occasion I had issues booting her up. I figured it was a connection issue and would simply nudge the edge connector around a bit to get her to fire up. I have since move the machine to our new house and she is not doing well. Since the move it will hardly boot completely and when it does it does not last as artifacts will slowly appear as it is played. (by artifacts I mean random letters, numbers and symbols will slowly appear on the screen). There is also a hum in the speaker that was never there before. All of these things suggest a connection error to me since before being moved form one location to another in a bumpy trailer things were ok.

I went ahead and replaced the edge connector as I thought for sure that was the issue. I also put in new 12 pin molex connects on the main harness in hopes of getting rid of the hum. Sadly all of that soldering was in vein because nothing has changed. I even threw a new ribbon cable on there as well. :(

Could I have bad sockets? I figure my ram/roms must be good if it plays sometimes. I'm lost. I read on Mikesarcade.com that the 28 pin sockets are junk so I was thinking of swapping those out. I read somewhere else that the roms should all be changed by this point. I don't mind doing the work but I would love to be able to narrow things down rather than just blindly start swapping out the entire board.

Any advice would be terrific!

Alf
 
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mine did the same thing, would work for a day or two then failed to boot/garbled screen.

if I reseated the chips that were socketed it would come alive then die a couple days later,

finally narrowed it down to a bad socked and replaced it with a machined socket.

start with reseating half of the chips then the others, keep halfing it till you figure out which one.
 
Reseating the chips helped considerably! Thanks for the idea! I only had a few minor glitches after that. I think my volume pot needs a cleaning because that seems to be the source of the hum, as tapping it generated alot of static. So I thought I was all set until I slid the game back into it's place and found that the monitor was half discolored... Literally the bottom half looks terribly magnetized... Time to pull out the power drill for some DIY degaussing...
 
ms pacman

try flexing the ribbon cable and see if i screws up. This will cause random power ups.
 
try flexing the ribbon cable and see if i screws up. This will cause random power ups.

I had to make a new one, I purchased all the stuff and recycled an old IDE cable.
of course you can buy one for about 10 bucks but I am a tool whore :)
 
Another source of problems on all the Pac cabs are the fuse holders in the bottom. Replace them.

You can get new ones at Radio Shack.
 
Well the monitor issue is resolved, thanks to my Dewalt drill... Man that sounds funny. It still has intermittent problems. It still resets sometimes when coins are inserted yet it is ok when I push the credit button. The wiring all looks good though? There must be a bad ground somewhere. I think I'll replace that fuse holder as mine is looking pretty tough. Updates to come. :)

Thanks again for the great suggestions.
 
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