Re: Pokey failure??

Funny (not really) this should be brought up. Just this week, I was
putting Major Havoc (Gravitar conversion) through self tests to check it
out. The self test gave a "J" error, which indicates an error at 13Q (I
think it's "Q"). Sure enough, thats the Quad Pokey Eliminator board.
It doesn't identify which one is bad, so I started self testing them on
the Black Widow right next to it. I went through 26 pokey chips, and
only 1 passed the self test in Black Widow. I was really wondering what
was wrong because the sound test appeared to be fine (that was my
question previously if there was a sound on Major Havoc on sound #17).
I changed the pokeys so much on the Black Widow, I screwed up the trace
underneath the pokey and the board went out.

I tested a few in a raster game at a friends, I don't remember if it was
Crystal Castles or Centipede, but they don't indicate a screen error if
it doesn't like the pokey there. The manual just basically says go
through all the sounds and if there is one that is bad, fix the pokey.

I was wondering, is it only the vector games that do some kind of extra
testing on a pokey? And if so, what is this test it is running? I know
pokey's are for sound and other I/O. Maybe the raster games just used
them for sound and the vectors use them for I/O and it was failing
there?

Joe
joemagiera@ameritech.net

MKDUD@aol.com wrote:
>
> Hello,
>
> I was just wondering how often people have had pokeys fail. Over the
> past week, I had to replace one in Tempest, Space Duel, and Centipede. I was
> curious as to whether anybody else had anything similar happen.
>
> Thanks,
> Michael Kelley
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Received on Thu Jan 10 19:35:33 2002