Working on the Frenzy game.

I got out into the garage and started drinking around with the Stern Frenzy game. I did some testing on the fuses and determined that at the very least I needed to replace a couple of those. So, I took a short bike ride up to Radio Shack and got some. I couldn’t nail down which ones were bad, so I just covered all of my bases and got replacements for the ones in the power supply and on the Frenzy logic boards.

I switched out the fuses and lo and behold now instead of a white screen on the Frenzy monitor I am getting a bunch of square pixels on the screen. That is encouraging. I did some more research on the Frenzy ZPU1001 board inside for what to do next. Most of the posts asked about what to do about acid damage on the Frenzy board. Always acid damage, it was so common. I didn’t initially notice much battery acid damage, I noticed some discoloration and dripping where some of the connections were green, but I thought battery acid damage would be more like a fire or something, very obvious.

I already had taken off the battery used on the ZPU1001 yesterday and thrown it away, so I figured it had to be a different problem. I tried readjusting some of the connections to see if that helped at all. It didn’t, so I went back to the posts. Some of them suggested neutralizing the acid damage with another agent and scrubbing the back of the board. I knew I didn’t pay much for the Frenzy game, so in the end I decided to be brave.

I removed the main processor board that had the battery leakage on it and once I looked at the back of it I realized how bad the leakage was. You could see discoloration over almost a third of the board, and all over the traces, probably gunking up everything. In the photos below you will see the contrast, on the front it is hard to tell and then how obvious it is on back.

I scrubbed the back of the traces with a vinegar water mixture. There was one capacitor that should be easy to replace in the leak zone, so I took that off as well. It was all bubbled up, so I figured that couldn’t be good. I could tell now how bad the acid leakage was because the solder was really hard to get flowing and get the cap out.

Here are some photos of the Frenzy PCB board, battery and the leakage down onto the ribbon cable below;

I have to let the ZPU1001 board dry for a day or so, so I just left things for now. I started to clean down the rest of the cabinet, mainly the top, and two of the buttons that wouldn’t even press anymore because of the crud in them. I put the buttons in a CLR mixture to loosen up the gunk. After cleaning the board the dirt was loose enough to scrub out with a toothbrush and put back in the panel.

I am going to go and get the replacement cap here in the next day or two, and cross your fingers, hopefully the game will work.

Here are some similar arcade posts

• Baby Pac-man Battery on MPU
• A new, refreshed Stern Frenzy
• Replacement cap for Frenzy ZPU1001 board
• Frenzy – Going to trade it this weekend
• Own a Frenzy arcade game? A couple of questions for ya.

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