Hey there. I have an order in with Bob Roberts for some connectors so I can test my Baby Pac Vidiot board “on the bench”. The Vidiot board is the main board for the video game portion of Baby Pac-Man.

I changed the rest of the lamps in the playfield this morning. I couldn’t wait to get the connectors to test the Vidiot board, so I figured I would hook all the boards and playfield back up in my old cabinet to test it that way. Here’s a video showing what the game is doing when you boot it up:

When it first comes on, it tries to play the startup music but it is a bit broken up.

It looks like I have one bulb out that I’ll have to checkout. The playfield looks very cool lit up and blinking like crazy.

The video on the monitor is a bit screwy. It’s only showing blue. When you play the game, it won’t switch over to the pinball portion. After the game is on for just a little bit longer than shown in that video, the monitor changes and just shows blue bars:

According to the info on Pinrepair.com, the Vidiot board’s LED should flash 10 times to indicate everything is working properly. On mine it only flashes 8, which usually means the TSM9928 chip in socket U16 is bad.

I pulled the chip, and the legs on it were really dirty…almost black. I thought for sure I took a picture of it before I cleaned it but it looks like I didn’t. Here’s a pic after I cleaned the legs with a fiberglass sanding pencil:

I popped the chip back in, and it still didn’t get past 8 flashes. I figured maybe the socket might be bad, so I changed that as well. I didn’t have a 40 pin socket, so I used a 24 pin, and cut down a bigger one to make up the difference.

Changing the socket didn’t help, but it probably should have been changed anyway. It looks like I’m going to need to replace that chip. They are supposed to be very hard to find. Bob Roberts had them listed on his site, but I contacted him and he just sold his last 2. ArcadeChips.com has them. I’m waiting for an email reply to see whether or not I’ll order through them.

One thing kind of interesting is that these chips were also used in Colecovision consoles. If I can’t find a replacement chip I’ll have to try to get a Colecovision on eBay and pull that chip from it.

When I do replace the chip, I plan on putting a heat sink on it. I’ve read that the chip gets very hot and a heat sink should help.