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February 3, 2012
Firepower repairs
Been busy, so hadn't had a chance to get to this one, but Firepower had been acting cranky for quite a while now. I hadn't been able to get the thing out of audit mode on a reliable basis. I tried a lot of things. New battery, only worked a couple times. New 5101, same situation. I tried cleaning the tarnished silver legs of the original ROM chips, ended up busting a leg off of one and had to develop my EPROM adapter board. Then the "Box O' Boards" showed up, and I really got distracted.
Anyway, I got back to it a week ago. I had to order some other parts anyway, so I figured I'd take care of a couple problems that were long overdue. As mentioned above, the EPROM adapter came out of this sequence of problems, and of course I am using one in here.
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.The other issue was a bit more confusing. It would work for a while, die again, just not very reliable. Not sure why, but a brand new 2032 lithium didn't seem to last very long. I had meant to get rid of the coin battery a while ago, as I've come to the conclusion that memory capacitors are a far superior option. I just never had any extra capacitors left for my own stuff, always needing them for customers. So I finally got one for me, and installed it.
Still not reliable though. Eventually I traced it out to a bad socket. It was a machined pin socket that I installed back when I first picked up the machine, and was visually in good shape. But I honestly am just not going to mess around with these things anymore, they are causing more problems than they are solving. I opted to just put the 5101 soldered straight to the board so that I could eliminate any bad connections.
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.Now it's reliably booting again finally. While I was at it, I also pulled the sound board as it was occasionally sounding like crap. I put a fresh sound ROM in it and recapped the whole thing. I may have to come back to this, but it seems ok for now.
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