I have a SS project that has been sitting in my garage for years. Every time I look at it my cortisol levels spike! I finally decided to look at the PCBs I pulled when I first got the project and see if they would motivate me to move forward with the project.
What follows is a month and change process of me struggling to bring this PCB set back to life. I had never worked on a System 2 set before and it became a personal goal to just prove to myself I can do this. I wanted to do it without asking for help either so I can improve my skills. I am happy to say after many days and hours reading schematics, probing, probing, probing and failing and one solid self dick punch, I have what I believe is solid repair.
Atari has great schematics for this era so the wiring harness was pretty easy to put together. I also have a spare CS pcb set that is known working so I verified the harness does indeed work on the bench and then put the SS set on the bench and wired it up.
Completely dead! I wasn't even getting 5v on the DEC T11. So, the CPU board is hosed. I also tried swapping the VID board into my working CS CPU board and it wouldn't boot. Both boards are hosed! I decided to focus on the CPU board first and right away I realized I was in for some shit.
Almost every socketed chip had broken legs and corrosion. Even worse, check out the missing TTL chip! Someone had started to use this as a parts board. There were a few resistors that also looked missing but otherwise I didn't see anything else stolen.
All the single ass-wipe sockets were in bad shape and needed to be replaced. I also had to burn all ROMS as they all had broken legs. After replacing ALL the sockets with dual wipes and borrowing the chips from my CS and installing the newly burned ROMS, I had some signs of life! 5V was present but the CPU was still dead and had no clock.
Tracing back to the crystal I found that it also had a broken leg and needed replacing.
After replacing that.. we have a game that is watchdogging! This is now where I spent the majority of the repair. Watchdog can mean anything and it took me a long time to narrow it down.