Re: Major Havoc/Tempest spinner problems

On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, peter jones wrote:
>
> From: jerry madsen <jetskimod@yahoo.com>
> >
> > conversion board also,everything works accept the
> > spinner(video,sound,buttons,coin mechs,all work)I know
> > my spinner works because my tempest works fine,my
> > conversion board is good also.A while back I plugged a
> > different MH board in before i got this one and it did
> > the same thing,everything worked accept the
> > spinner.Give me some ideas.
>
> meter the voltage on the spinner pcb. make sure it's getting 5v and
> ground. if thats o.k. then meter the quadrature outputs between the
> spinner pcb and the gameboard.

Sounds suspiciously like what happened when I hooked up an MH board
to a Tempest spinner, except my spinner "worked fine" for the first
30 seconds, and then became less and less responsive over the next
minute. The responsiveness decayed like voltage out of a capacitor.
That's as far as I got when I abandonded trying to debug it about 4
years ago.

Some googling reveals some possibly-useful threads:

("Ensure +4.8V at the LETA chip or it'll get confused")

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic=1&th=c141d0f82a2e76fa,2&seekm=3231A229.477%40

- Tempest doesn't use the LETA chip. It's possible that voltages that
  will "work" with Tempest won't "work" with MH.

("I fixed it by ensuring 5.0V at the encoder wheel")

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic=1&th=d3b63a50bc76e70f,1&seekm=437smo%24ihk%40nyx10.cs.du.edu#p

("Opto board on MH wheel has 150-ohm resistor, Tempest 100-ohm")

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&ic=1&th=d79c6abccdd2831a,2&seekm=989292917.705199%40goodnews.cos.agilent.com#p

- Hmm, that could explain a thing or two.

Although I never actually solved the problem, I did, however, eliminate
the MH board as the source of the problem; the original seller tested it
in his MH cabinet and it worked fine.

That test, however, wouldn't have eliminated the three things listed
above, specifically:

- The wiring harness (I might be losing something in my wiring)
- The optical board on the encoder (150 vs 100 ohm)
- The voltage setting (Suppose I had a wonky cap in my A/R II board,
  and my game powered up with 5.0V, but over the next 30 seconds, it
  fizzled down to 4.8V. That would account for my "it slows down"
  symptoms and my "it slows down at the rate I'd expect if something
  involving a R/C circuit were at fault".

I concluded that the problem was "somewhere other than the board", but
never fixed it. It seems that the people who *have* fixed it, did so
by fixing things I didn't look at it.

Something tells me that me, my 'scope, and my multimeter are gonna
get reacquainted with my MH board Real Soon Now.

BTW, anyone got a source on Optek OBP2216 optos? (i.e. the "curved"
kind that I have on my Tempest wheel? The "normal" ones won't fit
in the PCB mounting holes used by the "curved" ones.)

Later,
Doug.

-- 
 dougj   |
   @     |
hwcn.org |
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