Star Castle repair

Zinfer

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Without actually pulling the board out yet. I'm having a problem with a new project where the LED is blinking rapidly on the pcb, but the game is not firing up. It's a constant rapid flashing.
So I was curious if there first, is anyone out there that repairs Star Castles pcb's if I get in over my head.
I do need to ensure voltages are correct on the pcb yet, but I'm pretty sure it's got the +12v and the +5v. Like I said I haven't really gotten into the meat of the problem yet as it's blind, no sound and just a flashing LED.
 
Without actually pulling the board out yet. I'm having a problem with a new project where the LED is blinking rapidly on the pcb, but the game is not firing up. It's a constant rapid flashing.
So I was curious if there first, is anyone out there that repairs Star Castles pcb's if I get in over my head.
I do need to ensure voltages are correct on the pcb yet, but I'm pretty sure it's got the +12v and the +5v. Like I said I haven't really gotten into the meat of the problem yet as it's blind, no sound and just a flashing LED.

Check out this page, Bill is a great guy and a member here. He has lots of info. on his site and sells new chips and parts for SC to make the game more reliable.

http://www.biltronix.com/
 
Yea I read that in the Cine troubleshooting doc. But it's not going off, it is blinking very rapidly. The first thing it says is to check the power on those old cine power transformers/breakers.
 
Okey doke, last night I put some more time into Star Castle. I found U7 Eprom busted and bent pins. Replaced it with another 2716 and reprogrammed. The flickering led stopped flickering.
Getting a great +5v to the CPU board. I also double checked the rest of the Eproms and their checksum's are good.
I kept popping breakers though. Ran a heat check on the monitor and found the resistor row on the left quite warm. Ok, so disconnected the harness to the cine monitor. The breakers stopped popping. However after about a minute the LED would flash a moment accompanied by a high pitch tone, like a reset had just occurred.
Now when I turn the unit on, I get the explosion sound the LED flashes for a moment and goes out. But without video it makes it hard to see what's going on. First instinct would be to see if I could pull the CPU board and place it into a Armor Attack with a working monitor. Second, I'm thinking the SC cine monitor probably needs some new bottlecap transistors to start with.
Just wondering if I can actually do that - take the CPU board and place it into an AA to see what video there is, if any. Are the voltage inputs different from AA to SC?
Odd that if the cine monitor pulls too much voltage it would kick the breakers. It wasn't that way with AA. AA would just start toasting components without kicking the breakers.
 
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Well, this is the shot I took. I swapped the Armor Attack pcb out and inserted the Star Castle. Upon power up I initially got just a starfield. However, as the board warmed up it then began trying to draw vectors and the LED began again to flicker all the time. As a matter of fact, it seemed to be flickering with the vectors it was attempting to draw on screen, so basically the screen and LED are flickering.
But this is more activity than I've observed in the Star Castle cabinet. At least in AA it was TRYING to run. So it looks like I've got a problem with both the monitor and the power supply in the SC cabinet.
As for the CPU board, I didn't feel anything overly hot. I think I'm going to need someone with a CPU exorciser device and/or a logic analyzer to go from here.
IMG_0767.jpg
 
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i had the same "trying to draw vectors" thing and was garbled mess, i had a bad ribbon cable going to the monitor. if i wiggled it it was perfect!
 
Nope that can't be it. The same ribbon cable connects to the Armor Attack board, and it works flawlessly.
 
Well I did reflow J1. But no I didn't reflow the CPU to monitor connector or the connector to the CP or the connector to the Audio.
I suppose if I were really suspecting just the connector or ribbon, I'd tone out each pin. But that also doesn't explain the flashing LED. Regardless of the connection to the monitor, I should get blind play shouldn't I? Audio upon coinup? Because I did try that. And there was no game playing at all.
 
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On my cinematronics I had the misfortune to have a bad credit switch. I'm hitting it and then player 1 and no sound. I find out later after I got a monitor mostly working that the credit switch was bad (the other was fine).

I don't think there is an actual "coin up" sound either - but I could be wrong.
 
Right. I could go along with that other than the fact that the SC cpu was put in a AA cabinet and fired up. And upon throwing a coin through, hitting player one, followed by all the other buttons, there should be some audio if anything is actually working on the cpu between both the cabinets.
Also when put in the AA cabinet, the LED then began flickering again.
Does anyone repair Star Castle pcb's?
 
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It would help me out alot if (being I already have the +5v, 2 GND) at J1 hooked up on the bench, if I could just go out to my scope with X and Y. Going to look more at what pins may allow that.
On the bench I get 1 blip from the pcb's led and it's out. But in cabinet it flickers...hrm.
 
It would help me out alot if (being I already have the +5v, 2 GND) at J1 hooked up on the bench, if I could just go out to my scope with X and Y. Going to look more at what pins may allow that.
On the bench I get 1 blip from the pcb's led and it's out. But in cabinet it flickers...hrm.

I think you'll run into the problem that the PCB outputs a digital signal that the monitor chassis interprets. Someone more knowledgeable than me will chime in, I think, and say you can't, sorry.:(
 
Yea I'd probably have to go out with the ribbon to the Monitor chassis at J2 and then out from there to the scope.
I broke down and bought a Logic Analyzer. Now to learn that.
May have to pick up Bills' CPU Exorciser I guess. Not seeing anyone jumping up and down to fix these things.
 
I had two solar quest boards fixed by Cinelabs, takes forever but the work is done right. He told me that it would be nearly impossible to fix one of these boards with a logic analyzer, that is why he created the Exorciser, but you still need to build stuff for that and know how to use it.
 
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