What did I botch on my Black Widow today?

jehuie

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So I had a beautifully working Black Widow. Then I got a spare board that had issues so I borrowed the roms from my good board to test on that one. Then I swapped them back. Now it's not working.

When I put the original board in now the led doesn't come on and I'm getting a reading of zero where +5 should be. But if I swap in the crappy non-working board it gets a nice clean +5 and lights up. What the heck?

I swapped them a few times to be sure it wasn't just a connection issue but haven't had time to investigate further. This was SUPPOSED to be just a simple thing.....
 
So I had a beautifully working Black Widow. Then I got a spare board that had issues so I borrowed the roms from my good board to test on that one. Then I swapped them back. Now it's not working.

When I put the original board in now the led doesn't come on and I'm getting a reading of zero where +5 should be. But if I swap in the crappy non-working board it gets a nice clean +5 and lights up. What the heck?

I swapped them a few times to be sure it wasn't just a connection issue but haven't had time to investigate further. This was SUPPOSED to be just a simple thing.....

Ohm the +5 to ground on the bad board, It will probably be shorted. With power off and unplugged.

Try again with roms removed and see if the resistance changed.
 
Well crud. I was getting a short between the +5 and ground contact point after I put all the roms back in so I pulled them out one by one and checked for a short each after each one to isolate which was causing the problem. But after getting them all out, I still have the short. So I thought maybe it was one of the other socketed chips I had swapped out earlier. Pulled them all and I'm STILL getting a short.

I haven't changed anything else on the board so I'm confused. I must have accidentally tweaked something. But not sure how I could have introduced a short.
 
Aren't Atari boards known for bad IC sockets? Maybe a socket went bad when you pulled the ROMS out the first time. It happened when I had my Battlezone.

Could be. Would that likely introduce a short? And if so, how in the world would I narrow it down to the correct one? And yuck, I hate replacing sockets....always afraid I'll screw it up.
 
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