Been doing some serious reading this weekend, found a site called pinrepair.com and started reading up on transistors, capacitors, diodes and general soldering.
Got myself a new soldering station on saturday from jyebow who works at a Jaycar outlet.
Got Wipeout running again after fitting a new coil and flipper rebuild kit. It works great now, was a little unbalanced when I loaded new balls into it and lost count at 4, ended up with 5 balls which made the game interesting, kind of confused the machine somewhat but all good once I extracted the extra ball.
Figured I would have a go at Hankin Howzat now that my brain was primed with facts and figures gleaned from my earlier reading.
Think I am going backwards though, when I first fired up Howzat it deposited the ball in the shute, beeped a few times and promptly shut down, after that every time I powered it up it just emitted a few beeps and refused to go into game play.
Brandishing my new found knowledge I proceeded to unplug and replug each connector to various boards. I did manage to make some (reverse) headway, now everytime I power it up it no longer beeps and just powers up with lights but nothing else. No display anymore, no beeps, nothing.
Armed with my multimeter I probed around the driver boards but really didn't have much idea of what to look for. I did note however the LED on the main driver board is glowing dimly and also noted the connector pins on the boards looked somewhat grimey and in some cases put up a lot of resistance to being un-plugged.
So with the weekend drawing to a close, I find myself pretty much in the same situation as last week, Wipeout is now running, Galaxy not going, Hankin has less features than when I first got it, Super Hang On unchanged, Galaga about the same.
I think I really need someone local to call around and give me some pointers. Failing than can anyone suggest how I should proceed to troubleshoot the Hankin.
Cheers all, hope you all had a more productive weekend than me.