HELP! My Crystal Castles keeps resetting! Does anyone have any ideas?

[Crazy Climber]

Hello

Yesterday I found a nice Crystal Castles cocktail table on Craigslist for $150! Sweet right? Well when I got it home the player one trackball didn't work, no big deal, I just swaped it out with the second player and I was ready to play. So I play it for a few minutes and all was well, I get to level 3 and the game resets. The ROM OK and RAM OK come up then it played for a minute or so and did the exact same thing ROM OK RAM OK then it started doing it every few seconds. I unplugged it and it tried again....same thing Now it just resets constantly. I looked inside and nothing seems loose, I unplugged the PCB and took a look at it, seemed fine, plugged it back in and it just keeps resetting RAM OK ROM OK few seconds of the attract mode play then RAM OK ROM OK, well you get the point. Anybody have any ideas? Did I knock something loose? Is it a faulty part? I hope the board isn't bad, anyways any help would be really great. You guys know how frusterating these games can be when they do stuff like this Thanks in advance

[warmachine]

Sounds like a power supply issue. seems to happen a lot in the older games.

[Rybags]

Without too much trouble you should be able to swap in a PC PSU to take over the +5V duties on the game boards.

 

Mightn't solve the problem but at least would eliminate one possible cause from your list.

[djpubba]

Anyone with arcade games should buy a volt meter. Buy one and stick it on a chip in the middle of the motherboard to test the +5v levels. It should be between +4.75v and +5.25v DC. On most chips, the +5v pin will be the top right pin and ground the bottom left (with the notch facing up).

Edited June 20, 2008 by djpubba

[Crazy Climber]

Sounds like a power supply issue. seems to happen a lot in the older games.

Power supply...do you know if these are interchangeable from other arcade games? I have a Street Fighter 2 with a blown monitor I was in the process of stripping down and maybe I could re use it's power supply if possible?

[Crazy Climber]

Without too much trouble you should be able to swap in a PC PSU to take over the +5V duties on the game boards.

 

Mightn't solve the problem but at least would eliminate one possible cause from your list.

I honestly would have no idea how to do this but thanks for the tip. I don't even own a Computer - lol

[Crazy Climber]

Anyone with arcade games should buy a volt meter. Buy one and stick it on a chip in the middle of the motherboard to test the +5v levels. It should be between +4.75v and +5.25v DC. On most chips, the +5v pin will be the top right pin and ground the bottom left (with the notch facing up).

I do have access to a Volt Meter, you will have to forgive me here but I don't entirely understand the instructions. I just stick it on one of the chips?

[Cassidy Nolen]

Sounds like the watchdog circuit is resetting on the board. I would start by cleaning the edge connector on the board with a pencil eraser, making sure you have good clean contacts. Next, I would reseat all of the ROM and RAM chips that are in sockets. Missile Commands were famous for having crappy chip sockets that cause it to do the same thing.

 

For the last two years I have also seen a great number of Atari games need the big blue capacitor changed in the bottom of the cabinet. I am not saying that is whats causing your reset but dirty signal can trigger the watchdog to reset as well. They are going on 30 years old now and I'd be willing to bet that one has seen less than perfect operational conditions over that time. Worth the few bucks from an online place to buy one.

 

If you do use a voltmeter, find what the 5 Volts looks like across a chip. Its a matter of touching the leads to some test points on the board (should be marked) and seeing what you get. If you have between 4.99 and 5.05 (give or take some) your power supply is fine. AR2 boards are a bit harder to bypass than some other games (say your Street Fighter for example) so the Atari ones are not as easy as some others. They integrated some audio parts into the power supply boards. Not saying they don't blow but the Ataris I have worked on over the years are far more likely to have a burned connector than a bad power supply (Midway, Taito, modern games, etc. all tend to have more power supply issues).

 

Start with your basics and work up. Great find by the way

 

C

[Crazy Climber]

OK, I got a Voltmeter from work and I'll try checking tonight after work. Cleaning the edge connector will come next but as far as reseating the ROM and RAM chips I'm not really sure how to do that. Do they just pop right out and snap back in or would some soldering be involved? I just don't want to damage the board since these (extra CC boards) don't pop up very often and when they do I am sure they are not cheap - lol. Thanks

[djpubba]

I like to test chips from the the middle to the farthest away from the edge connector to test voltage. Since the test points are usually really close to the edge connector, you don't always get an accurate reading of the overall voltage present on the board if you only test there.

 

Just touch the probes from the volt meter to the upper right and lower left pins on any chip that starts with 74 or most EPROMs (with the notch facing up). Be careful not to short pins together with the tip of the probes.

[mr.bill]

if you CC has/using the filter pcb, you can toss it and connect the wiring harness directly to the pcb. Look for burn connectors. Very common for CC to burn the connector. You can either repair the trace or if you have to solder a jumper wire to the correct test point.

 

You might find the edge connector to be a little loose. If it does not fit snug, You can get all kinds of problems. It will burn a resistor on the audio reg. (it thinks the volts are low and keeps cranking up voltage and burns out the AR resistor)

 

if its loose, you have a few choices.

Replace the connector (or replace just the pins)

re-tin the pads on the pcb(It will build them up and make it fit tighter. but be careful as you can lift the traces off and don't add too much solder as it can break the pin in the edge connector)

 

One quick and less dangerous thing you can try is to shove flat toothpicks behind the pins on the edge connector. If you look at the edge connector, you will see a small channel behind the pins. If you want to pop out the pins, Shove a hair pin(bobby pin )back in there and you can slide out the pin and replace it). But if you shove a toothpick back there it will slightly raise the pin. Shove the toothpick in and break it off flush to the plastic. You can do anywhere from 1 to 4 pins with each flat toothpick

 

Depending on how loose it is, I will do 1 side only. If its still loose, I will do the other side.

Edited July 1, 2008 by mr.bill

[Crazy Climber]

I'm going to give all this stuff a try 4th of July weekend. Got a little side tracked with work. The connector is definitely loose so I think I'll start there. I hope I can figure this out Crystal Castles is an awesome game!