What’s this, an arcade related post? Wow! Pretty crazy, I know….

I’ve been trying to get my games in working order for our Christmas party. For GTI Club, I’ve been struggling with a Wells Gardner U5000 (AKA steaming pile of horse crap) for awhile now and *think* I have that fixed.

The sound on my Q*Bert has been wrong for awhile now. I tried fixing this before and didn’t get anywhere with it. I didn’t think it was that bad, so I gave up for awhile.

I decided to take another crack at it. I thought that only one sound was wrong, the noise made when coily jumps off the board. I now realize that mine sounds pretty craptastic compared to how it should sound so I need to get this fixed even more now.

I figured this out by doing the sound test on Q*Bert in MAME. Here is how it should sound:

Here is how mine sounds:

Many of the sounds are missing or wrong.

There is a troubleshooting flowchart for Q*Bert sound boards here:
http://www.cademo.com/arcade/index.htm

When I last worked on this, I did quite a few things:

• Replaced the sockets for all socketed chips on the sound board, except for the SC01 speech chip at U14 (I didn’t have the right size socket for that)
• Replaced all the electrolytic capacitors on the sound board
• Fixed some issues with the header pins on the filter board
• Replaced A10 on the main board
• Replaced U16 on the sound board

For this new attempt at fixing it, I started by changing the socket for the speech chip at U14.

I didn’t have the right size socket, so I cut one in half:

That didn’t fix it, but at least I got to play with my soldering iron for awhile.

If I go by the flow chart, it looks like I should try replacing U15 next. However, I’ve read that U17 is also a common failure so I’m going to try changing that next. I don’t have any 74LS30 chips around so I just ordered a few. Maybe I’ll get lucky and that will take care of it. If not, maybe Santa’s elves will make me a new working sound board.