MrSiggler

Hey all! I've got a CDX which has some peculiar audio problems. When the thing starts up without a cartridge inside, it goes to the Sega CD disc screen, with the animation, and music. Only the music appears to be missing many of it's notes. If I start a cartridge.. there's no sound at all, or at least, no sound from any of the game's I've yet tried. It's as if part of the music hardware is faulty, but not all of it? I've spent several days poking at this thing, I've replaced all the capacitors, scoured the surface of the board looking for any signs of visible damage, a bad trace, or anything, but can't find a thing! I'm at a bit of a loss here.. I've had some luck getting help with Atari machines here in the past, so figured I'd try my luck again... Any suggestions on this issue, or some advice on how to attempt to track down whichever component is faulty in a general sense would be great.. thanks! There's a video where you can hear the weird music here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pu-n2aWPhnY

lol. I'd do it myself, but the board was sent back today! Hopefully the replacement board won't have the same problem. Now the month or more wait until it gets here to find out

Finally got this unit working! Sorta. I got a new flex circuit from Best Electronics to fix the buttons, ribbon, power LED and such... but had completely forgotten about the power issues at the time. What I did was perma short the ground/headphone jack, and attached a USB cable to the battery posts to feed 5V into the board that way. A bit hacky, but works. I'd like to repair it proper some day.. If anyone has any advice on how to better fix this, please lemme hear it. lol. I made a video of this mess of a fix, if anyone's curious. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjC7ZtyKgTo

It's been a while since I posted this, but I finally got my answer! The board I got was either defective, or some odd incompatible version. As a second game I acquired, Wolfenstein3D exhibits the exact same problem as Syndicate. I made a video showing the glitch for anyone curious... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esqbgMCda3M

I'd asked for help many, many months ago regarding some issues I was having with some old Atari stuff.. a Jaguar with a bad cartridge slot, and a Lynx II that wouldn't turn on properly... I finally got around to trying to fix them, and having enjoyed watching many videos of people tinkering with their consoles or repairing them, on youtube... thought I'd give it a shot myself. Here's a link to the playlist, some Jaguar and Lynx stuff there at the moment. My next hack will be adding a cartridge slot to one of my Flashback II machines. http://www.youtube.c...62851DCC652033E

Oh shush you, with your logic! Been so long since I actually booted a Jag with a commercial cart that I had completely forgotten about the checks! There are homebrew carts? Tell me more. lol

That's one thing I was wondering about my old board. Since the games do start fine, if there's some sort of check it does, does that mean I shouldn't get surprised randomly during gameplay by a problem caused by a bad pin connection, or such?

The 5 games I have are Doom, Cybermorph, Alien vs Predator, Rayman and Syndicate. I took a look at the two boards.. I did notice that the board that Syndicate won't play on has Jaguar CPU V1.0, and the one it does work on, has Jaguar CPU v1.1 ?

I purchased a broken "as-is" Jaguar off of ebay a while back for cheap, seems the problem was a few crushed pins in the cartridge socket.. after a few failed attempts to get the pins up, I bought a new 60pin connector, as well as a replacement system board for my Jaguar (I wasn't confident in my ability to actually change the port, but had to try anyhow!) My intent was to use the new board in my Jag, and try to fix the old one as a project. And to my surprise, I managed to get the new socket on the board, and it's now happily starting all my games! Here's the weird thing though, the replacement board I got, it's got some weird graphics issue with one of my games, Syndicate, that my old board with the new socket does not. So it seems my "sure thing" has a problem, where what I assumed to be destined to failure works great. So I've got the new board, works with 4 of my 5 games, and the old board works with 5 of the 5. I'd have figured that a new board, and an old board with a new socket.. if a game was going to work, it'd either work in both, or not work at all. And yes, I cleaned that game thoroughly. What happens, is when the game starts, you see the word "Ocean" on the screen, and then when it goes to the title screen, the word ocean blinks again in red, and what I get is a black area, about 1/3 of the screen in the middle that never "clears" so to speak.. the briefing screen, the map screen, and such are hidden behind this black area, but any text, like the mission description and the like, will appear on top of this black area, but never clear, when a new menu opens. If I go into briefing, back to the main menu, back to briefing repeatedly, for example, I end up with a big mess of text in the middle of the screen behind whatever happens to be up. Once I actually start a mission, the black area goes away.. only to return again once the mission ends and you return to the menus. Again, all 4 of my other games work great, and this Syndicate cart does work in my other Jag board.. and the Syndicate cart is about as clean as I can get it... End ramble... Anyone ever see a glitch like this, and if so, any suggestions? Thanks!

Hey all! Recently got myself a Jaguar, was rather looking forward to trying it out, having never played one! Problem is, the cartridge slot has some pins that look bent/smushed down. I've been very carefully trying to get the pins back up into shape, but it's very slow going, and I've not managed to get any one pin back into shape yet.. Has anyone had this happen, and had any luck fixing it? If so.. any tips on how to best get the pins straightened? If not... are there any replacement parts available anywhere? Many thanks.

Thanks! I replaced the Q8/Q7 with the aforementioned "1AM" part, they seem to operate fine. By that, I mean the machine isn't smoking or doing anything peculiar, and the games do play. Right now I'm left with two problems. The membrane has deteriorated over the years, and doesn't seem to work properly. The LED never lights up(the LED does work. I fed power to the membrane by hand and it lit up), and half the buttons don't work. Including the on button. (Hence my initial assumption that the Q12 was bad, but if I use the headphone trick to jump start the unit, the off button does turn the unit off, the reset button also works. I presume the Q12 mosfet is intact okay?) For the ribbon cable/membrane I'm thinking I might be able to rescue it with a circuit pen, and/or some sort of conductive glue. Keeping my eyes open for a ribbon cable with the same spacing as this one to slap on the end. For the power issue (it seems the full 9V of whatever power source is used it sent into the main board), I'll try slipping a 5V voltage regulator in there to safely reduce the voltage to 5V before the lynx's broken power circuit sees it. Has anyone done this?

An update. I googled around and found a replacement part for the Q8 spot.. a transistor with "1AM" on the top. Swapped out the fried part for this, and after shorting the headphone/battery negative, still had nothing but a white screen. I tested various spots around the board for voltages.. it was 8.x volts, closer to 9v. Having read that anything that high would likely kill the board I assumed it dead, but decided to try feeding it 5V directly just to see for sure... wired up a USB cable to the battery posts and plugged into into a wall charger, and the game started! I couldn't control anything though. I've discovered that the green coloured ribbon, the one for the front panel.. LED/buttons/so forth, seems to have been stripped of the black conductive film. I trimmed back the ribbon to expose more black, but it seems it's very brittle, and that new black came right off as well... I'm currently trying to rig up something to get this ribbon cable to work. So I'm not sure if the Q12 is actually bad or not. If the front panel ribbon isn't working right, perhaps the power button presses simply aren't getting through? So I think I'm dealing with two issues. The bad ribbon cable from the front of the Lynx to the main board, and the PSU area sending the full 9V into the board... any suggestions? I'd love to get this thing working!

Hey all. I've got a broken Atari Lynx I'm trying to fix. I'm hoping it only needs a few parts replaced.. When I first got it, I put batteries in, flipped it over and tried to turn it on.. the power button didn't seem to work, the power LED wouldn't light up. But I noticed the screen *was* on, just really dim, saying insert game. So I turned up the brightness, and could see the screen fine. The off button wasn't doing anything, so I tried plugging the game in... the game did start. Audio played. It worked great (aside from the lack of power LED) for about 10 seconds, then it abruptly seemed to shut off... wasn't able to get any life out of it after that. (note, I noticed that all too familiar smell of burnt electronics shortly before it went black). So I hit these forums, and saw about the Q12 thing.. so tried jumping the headphone/battery thing.. when I did such, before I was able to flip the thing over to check for life, I noticed smoke coming out of it.. so I cut the power. On inspection, the part labeled Q8, I believe, had burnt/split in half. Obviously there's no point in my tinkering further at present And now my questions! What parts are compatible with the Q8/Q7? Could that part be the cause of the thing not powering up/acting oddly, and would I be wise to replace the Q12 part as well? (assuming it might have caused the Q8/Q7 part to fry?) And if so, what part is compatible with that? I've got a stack of PC motherboards which appear to have parts that look identical to these, but I'm not sure if they're compatible.. Many thanks for any info/advice!