Testing Tac-Scan > Star Trek captain chair ?

HPR pinball

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Question for the experts, is it possible to test a Tac-Scan cage boardset in a Star Trek captain chair, is it plug and play ?

Is it possible to move boards in the cage to any of the 5 positions, any order to respect ?

Thanks for precious infos !
 
For testing purposes, yes it should work fine. The boards can be in any spot in the cage, but practically speaking a couple of them (the x/y pair) need to be in consecutive slots due to the ribbon cable that connects the two. Incidentally, the X/Y pair and the sound board are the same between these two games. If you have a good set of boards in the ST, you might want to swap in only the Tac Scan CPU and EPROM boards first, to make sure those are good before testing the rest.

The control harness is not plug and play, but it might be close enough to work. I've never tried it though so YMMV.
 
For testing purposes, yes it should work fine. The boards can be in any spot in the cage, but practically speaking a couple of them (the x/y pair) need to be in consecutive slots due to the ribbon cable that connects the two. Incidentally, the X/Y pair and the sound board are the same between these two games. If you have a good set of boards in the ST, you might want to swap in only the Tac Scan CPU and EPROM boards first, to make sure those are good before testing the rest.

The control harness is not plug and play, but it might be close enough to work. I've never tried it though so YMMV.
Thanks for this nice explanation. Right on target ! 🙂🙂
 
It's alive!!! 🥳
IMG_0812.jpeg

Edit: Controls were working just fine but no sound. We swapped sound board with a star trek set that i also needed to test: still no sound. So it appears both soundcards are not working as putting back HPR's star trek, the sound worked just fine.
The star trek set also have xy issues. We swapped ribbon cable and that helped a little but still not 100%.
 
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The reason you likely have no sound is the Star Trek uses a speech board where as Tac scan does not.

In order to hear the Tac scan sound, you need to jumper pins 1 and 3 (or 4 and 6, I forget, but it will be obvious looking at the harness) of the speech board connector of the Star Trek harness , as the audio passes through those pins. Without the jumper, the audio from the sound board has no where to go.
 
The reason you likely have no sound is the Star Trek uses a speech board where as Tac scan does not.

In order to hear the Tac scan sound, you need to jumper pins 1 and 3 (or 4 and 6, I forget, but it will be obvious looking at the harness) of the speech board connector of the Star Trek harness , as the audio passes through those pins. Without the jumper, the audio from the sound board has no where to go.

We saw that and tried adding my star trek speech board in tac scan. Still no output.
 
The universal sound cards are the toughest to troubleshoot out of the three vector sound cards due to its design with nine independent sound channels that all get mixed together to form various sounds in Star Trek and Tac/Scan. Hence the name 'universal'. Had the G80 platform lived a longer life, I'm sure this would have been the standard card due to its versatility compared to the meatball and battle star designs. In any event, no sound all together is not common, but I've seen it a handful of times (for various reasons from a simple open capacitor to digital stuff). If you've checked the wiring as others suggested and everything else seems to be in order, then you are into board level probing and troubleshooting.

You're always welcome to mail hardware to me for a full rebuild. I also have the audio fingerprint of every sound committed to memory. Sometimes a sound will 'work' in the self-test, but if it's a combination of five of the nine sound channels for example, you might hear a partial sound if any of the five are not working. That might not be apparent to someone who is going through the test for the first time. I guess it's a curse from repairing so many, ha-ha. Remember time is money and money is time. And time can slip away on these quickly. Either way, good luck on the troubleshooting!
 
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It's alive!!! 🥳
View attachment 721066

Edit: Controls were working just fine but no sound. We swapped sound board with a star trek set that i also needed to test: still no sound. So it appears both soundcards are not working as putting back HPR's star trek, the sound worked just fine.
The star trek set also have xy issues. We swapped ribbon cable and that helped a little but still not 100%.

As I suspected: that is badass.
 
The universal sound cards are the toughest to troubleshoot
Thanks for the pointers! I'm still looking for many parts to be able to debug this at home:

- powersupply/amp
- the screen!
- the spinner and interface board

until i find a suitable screen, the rest unfortunately doesn't matter.

I know tou have a few items i might need, you're on the top of my list ;)
 
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