Post by Peer on Aug 31, 2024 9:02:39 GMT -5
A question to the hardware wizards:
One of my classroom consoles has a curious defect. Pressing the controller buttons is sometimes recognized by the console, and sometimes it is not.
The controllers themselves are perfectly fine and functioning (tested with several controllers and other consoles). Yet, sometimes the respective console does not register any buttons being pressed. The joysticks keep working, i.e. their movements are always correctly recognized.
It does not seem to be thermal issue. Sometimes everything works fine when the console is switched on from cold, and sometimes it does not. And when the consoles runs for a longer time and gets warm, the issue still occurs. The buttons suddenly do not work anymore, and suddenly they start working again. Sometimes going from one state to the other takes just seconds, sometimes it takes hours.
When the buttons start not-working, then this happens on both controllers at the same time, i.e. both joysticks continue working fine, but all 8 buttons do not work (and all 8 resume working again at the same moment).
Other than that, the state of the console if pretty good, and everything else works flawlessly (graphics, sound, game mechanics). The phenomenon occurs with all games, so this is also not game-specific. The connector pins inside the controller plugs are all fine, none of them broken or loose.
One of my classroom consoles has a curious defect. Pressing the controller buttons is sometimes recognized by the console, and sometimes it is not.
The controllers themselves are perfectly fine and functioning (tested with several controllers and other consoles). Yet, sometimes the respective console does not register any buttons being pressed. The joysticks keep working, i.e. their movements are always correctly recognized.
It does not seem to be thermal issue. Sometimes everything works fine when the console is switched on from cold, and sometimes it does not. And when the consoles runs for a longer time and gets warm, the issue still occurs. The buttons suddenly do not work anymore, and suddenly they start working again. Sometimes going from one state to the other takes just seconds, sometimes it takes hours.
When the buttons start not-working, then this happens on both controllers at the same time, i.e. both joysticks continue working fine, but all 8 buttons do not work (and all 8 resume working again at the same moment).
Other than that, the state of the console if pretty good, and everything else works flawlessly (graphics, sound, game mechanics). The phenomenon occurs with all games, so this is also not game-specific. The connector pins inside the controller plugs are all fine, none of them broken or loose.
Any advice is appreciated where to start checking.
Is there a dedicated line, or IC, or IC pin, where the buttons signals of the controllers are routed to on the digital board? Any good place to check for bad soldering or corrosion? Any other ideas?
Many thanks,
Peer
PS: I deem it highly improbable (though not completely impossible) that just the single RAM cell where the buttons states are usually stored by the BIOS has stopped working, since all other RAM seems to work without any problems.
