This Bally Squawk and Talk came in from a Flash Gordon. The owner said it would work for awhile and then start glitching out until he reset the machine. Everything was all original on it, so I did what I consider standard procedure for a Bally Squawk and Talk first which is to recap, reflow, and replace both of the 1k dial pots.
A lot of these boards are suffering bad pin degradation on the chips. Some of the ones that get it the worst are the ROMs and obsolete TMS5200 speech chip. Usually, I can pull and sand the tarnish on the legs of these chips for better pin to socket continuity. This game had it particularly bad though, and the legs were so compromised that both ROMs and the TMS5200 couldn’t even be pulled from their sockets without multiple legs just falling off.
The TMS5200 is especially sad to lose since you can’t find them anymore. I had an old stock thankfully with decent legs on it I was able to use. I put new sockets on it and the two ROMs. I re-jumpered the board for 2732 ROMs and burned new ROMs, then put the board up on my S&T bench and it worked great. I let it sit there for awhile and burn in, coming back occasionally to check it again and run through test.
This System 11 board came in as a spare that was in unknown condition they wanted to get right and have for when they might need down the road. The board was very clean, no corrosion, so that was a big plus. The game didn’t have CPU chips or ROMs in it. Since it didn’t have a dedicated game to go into yet, I just transferred the CPU chips and ROMs from my System 11 test board for testing. I removed the old battery holder and 6116 RAM and installed NVRAM at U25. I also replaced the 8 electrolytic caps and reflowed a few areas I always hit on these System 11 boards.
Once it was up on the test fixture, the only thing that was a problem was one locked on special solenoid. I replaced the associated TIP102 and 2N4401 pre-driver for it, and it went through the full test cycle perfectly. I didn’t take a super close look, but being either a System 11 nothing or A board, it’ll pretty much run the gamut for System 11 CPU replacement for the owner.