Defender Power On Troubleshooting
And Defender makes three! That’s right, 3 out of 4 game systems at our Palm Springs Midmod property were DOI (dead on inspection)! I knew about Frogger after a guest had lamented that the game system, one of her favorites, worked for only a day during their stay, but having both Defender and Tempest also on fritz was really disappointing. Tempest, would require more expert analysis, but fortunately, Defender turned out to be an easy fix for the power up issue, which lead to the discovery (and repair) of another issue.
The only issue with Defender’s powering on turned out to be the slow but steady deformation of the back door panel of the unit. It was bowing out a bit more in the center than it had been previously and as a result, wasn’t engaging the back panel power cut-off switch. Opening the back door revealed the issue and engaging the cut-off switch manually powered the unit right up. Yay for simple fixes!
Rather than drill yet another hole in the back panel to more firmly affix it to the cabinet at the center point, and thus more reliably engage the power cut-off switch, I simply decided to rotate the cut-off switch so that it was facing the bottom the cabinet and then pulled out switch knob to be in service mode and engaged permanently. After all, I’m the only one who will work on these systems so no real need for the safety aspect of cutting power to the unit when the back door is removed. If I ever do decide it is a safety issue, I’ll most likely address the problem by remounting the service cut off switch closer to the back edge of the cabinet so that it is engaged even by a slightly bowed out back panel.
Of course, nothing is ever completely simple with the original “problem child” of my collection. When the unit was finally powered on, I found it curious that the system went into configuration mode. That really shouldn’t happen, so I opened the front coin door to access the service switch to work through the configuration and reset free play mode on the system. Played a quick game (37K, not too bad) to establish a high score and then powered it off to make sure everything was hunky-dory. No such luck. Upon power up, we were back to the configuration screen. Something was up with the persistent memory of the system, and I knew the likely culprit.
