Thursday, November 19, 2015

More work on the Star Trip sound problem

I spent some time tonight looking into the sound problems on the Star Trip table. The issue is that everything works fine for about 3 minutes then a whine begins and never ends. The sound effects try to play but the whine is loud and overwhelms everything.

After reading about some different ideas, I started by reheating all the solder joints on the main board. Not everything, but the ones that looked suspect:






Following that, after reading about problems with "Scanbe" sockets, I pulled the chips off the main board one by one and verified I did not have Scanbe sockets:



After putting it all back together - the same problem. Runs fine, works perfectly but the whine is teeth-rattling after a couple of minutes!

Since the problem occurs only after a few minutes, I reasoned it has to be either a capacitor or some connection that fails as it heats up...note to self, as I write this it occurs to me it could be a chip that fails as it heats up as well.

The next step was to see what board the problem was on: MPU (Main Processor Board) or MSU (Main Sound Unit)

While the game was on, I very carefully opened it up, hoping not to have another self-created disaster. Then unplugged the sound board. My reasoning is that if it is heat-related, unplugging the sound board and letting it cool while the main processor is working will tell me.

My assumption: after 5 minutes, when I plug the sound board back in:

  1. If the sound continues, the problem is in the main board
  2. If the sound is not there but comes back after a couple of minutes, then it was in the cooled down sound board.


After several minutes, I plugged the sound board back in and the whine was still there. It appears the problem is somewhere in the Main Processor Unit...sigh

Next step is to try and decipher the schematics enough to figure out where the sound-related components are and really dig into them.



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