Tron player direction and P2 coin used to work

Dervacumen

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Tron Joystick Down and Right stopped working

Well, this is the reason I prefer dirty working games to pretty ones that don't.
I had a great working Tron and decided I'd finally start cleaning it up. I started with the control panel.
The panel looks great now, and the new black lighting is great. Bummer that tron will not move down or right anymore. And after running the self test the P2 start button is also not working.
I traced the wiring and everything checks out, or at least I know I have working switches and there is continuity up to the two connectors that attach to what looks to me to be the sound/io board.
According to the schematic, pin 2 and 4 on J5 control Right and Down, respectively and pin 4 on J4 is the input for the P2 select. I don't really know where to go from here. I pulled the board and took a look for anything obvious and I don't see anything. Or maybe I don't know if I saw anything obvious. I really wish I had a dirty Tron machine to play. Any suggestion on where to look?
 
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Did you double check the leaf switch/button contacts to make sure the wires are still connected? I cleaned a Pac cocktail CP and it had been re-soldered quite poorly and the wires broke loose without me noticing. I fired up the game and the joystick didn't work properly.
 
Did you double check the leaf switch/button contacts to make sure the wires are still connected? I cleaned a Pac cocktail CP and it had been re-soldered quite poorly and the wires broke loose without me noticing. I fired up the game and the joystick didn't work properly.

+1, but to add to this, clean the leaf switches. they need it. i cannot count how many barn fresh dirty joysticks found within a tron, ms pacman, etc. come back to life with 1 minute of work.

business cards are your friend for this task. rough enough to remove crud, but won't damage the tips like sandpaper will do. emory board also works.
 
I have cleaned the contacts and adjusted the travel distance on the leaf switches using these nifty tools that were made specifically for such a job. When I use a multimeter and place one lead on each of the leaf switch tabs (NO and GROUND) and then press the switch I do get continuity so the switch is working right. I have re-soldered one of the ground wires that had come loose but the ground wiring is a double loop system so even with that one wire disconnected the switch should have been operable.
I should also say I didn't take apart the joystick except to clean the housing.
Hmmm. Would this be possibly a bad chip?
 

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Not sure if you already checked this but, my Tron would not go right and the spinner only worked about 180 degrees. I had taken the control panel out, tested all leaf switches and the spinner. It ended up being: for the spinner, one pin at the molex connector for the control panel was pulled back just a little bit, and for the joystick not going right, it was at the main connector to the PCB, the wire for going right's pin was not making good contact at the PCB. You may want to check on those areas. It was not that easy to find until I traced the whole circuit for each problem. They looked ok, but were not making a good contact.
 
Not sure if you already checked this but, my Tron would not go right and the spinner only worked about 180 degrees. I had taken the control panel out, tested all leaf switches and the spinner. It ended up being: for the spinner, one pin at the molex connector for the control panel was pulled back just a little bit, and for the joystick not going right, it was at the main connector to the PCB, the wire for going right's pin was not making good contact at the PCB. You may want to check on those areas. It was not that easy to find until I traced the whole circuit for each problem. They looked ok, but were not making a good contact.

Okay, well that's encouraging. I'll take a better look in those areas, especially the connectors on the board. I'm crossing my fingers. On the other hand, I can always use this as an excuse to buy a logic probe and learn something new.
 
I had some time to get back to this over the weekend.
I found one frayed wire and fixed that. I checked continuity from the switch tabs to the board connector and all was good. I verified that the molex connections were solid.
Still the same.

So I opened up the edge connector and checked continuity there. That was good too.
I Took each wire where it was attached to the edge connector and gave it about 6-7 seconds of wiggling to see if that would establish a better connection. Plugged back in and no luck.

I went back to the molex. It had to be there, and turns out it was. Don't know why I was loosing continuity there but I suspect the plastic casing has become so rigid with age that the connection was loosening when I put the CP in place to check the controls. Or more likely there's a bad connection from the wire to the pin. I'll reflow the pins at some point.

Lesson learned: Reflow the suspect solder joints before anything else. Then replace the connectors if need be. I really want to keep this original so I'll probably no do so.

Thanks to all. In hindsight, of course it was a loose connection but as I second guess myself while learning, I thought it might have been a bad chip. Didn't make sense in today's world but who knows what they were thinking when they built this many years ago. I'll say it was a good lesson because I dug in to the schematics to troubleshoot this and learned a lot in the process. Once of the reasons I love this hobby.
 
I had some time to get back to this over the weekend.
I found one frayed wire and fixed that. I checked continuity from the switch tabs to the board connector and all was good. I verified that the molex connections were solid.
Still the same.

So I opened up the edge connector and checked continuity there. That was good too.
I Took each wire where it was attached to the edge connector and gave it about 6-7 seconds of wiggling to see if that would establish a better connection. Plugged back in and no luck.

I went back to the molex. It had to be there, and turns out it was. Don't know why I was loosing continuity there but I suspect the plastic casing has become so rigid with age that the connection was loosening when I put the CP in place to check the controls. Or more likely there's a bad connection from the wire to the pin. I'll reflow the pins at some point.

Lesson learned: Reflow the suspect solder joints before anything else. Then replace the connectors if need be. I really want to keep this original so I'll probably no do so.

Thanks to all. In hindsight, of course it was a loose connection but as I second guess myself while learning, I thought it might have been a bad chip. Didn't make sense in today's world but who knows what they were thinking when they built this many years ago. I'll say it was a good lesson because I dug in to the schematics to troubleshoot this and learned a lot in the process. Once of the reasons I love this hobby.
 
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