Sea Wolf arrived in the Repair Station completely dead with no signs of life.  The first thing you realize when repairing a Sea Wolf is that it is a cross between an electro-mechanical game and a video game. Thus, there are many challenges to overcome in order to get it running 100%.  My first move was to disconnect everything except the power board and fire up the machine.  Upon doing this the game was still dead. The problem ended up being a cracked fuse holder on the transformer board in the bottom of the cabinet.  Once the fuse holder was replaced I finally had power running in the cabinet.

The next problem to tackle was the dead Motorola XM 702 monitor.  As soon as the monitor harness was plugged in and the game was turned on the fuse in the chassis pan, F2, blew immediately.  I labored over this issue for quite some time and could not find a single component that was shorting the fuse.  Even after taking off the chassis PCB and triple checking all the bottle cap transistors the F2 fuse still blew immediately upon power up.  I have never had this problem before but it turns out the main transformer as shown in the picture was dead shorted causing F2 to blow.  Fortunately I had a working transformer in the parts bin so swapped out the bad one. Keep this in mind when you are trying to track down a very hard to find dead short.  Before reinstalling the monitor chassis I installed a  cap kit and cleaned it up.  At this point I had a nice clear screen of full raster.

This is where Sea Wolf, even though it is quite old and pretty straight forward, can be one of the most difficult games to get 100% working.  The game has a 8080 ‘L’ board set (2 boards), a separate sound board and a board that accepts mechanical inputs from the periscope.  You quickly realize there are a high number of connections all of which have to be perfect for the game to work properly.  I suggest starting with a massive cleaning and bullet-proofing of all connections before attempting to analyze ANY game board symptoms.  Clean edge connectors with contact cleaner and a fiber glass pen, adjust or even replace all the Midway edge connectors and make sure you have good continuity from board to board through all the harnesses.  After this lengthy process I plugged everything in and was met with a non-working game and garbage on the screen – Yipeee! (see picture).  This screen basically told me several possibilities - bad RAM or the 8080 CPU was not booting.  On Midway games pulling ROM H, firing up the game should get you a clean set of alternating thick/thin lines.  Unfortunately I was left with the same garbage on the screen.  I replaced the CPU with no change.  I thought for sure the reset line was shot but I tested it on the linear power supply and found no problems.  Next I dove a little deeper and measured all of the inputs and outputs on the 8080 CPU with my logic probe and finally found one single fault.  Pin 13 (the HOLD signal) was reading high instead of low stopping the CPU dead in its tracks.  Working upstream I found two faulty IC’s and verified them as bad with my trusty HP 10529A logic comparator.  I replaced a 7486 at A4 on the mother board and a 7414 at C1 on the daughter board. Once again I fired up the game to see if I could get pin 13 back to low.  Pin 13 was now reading low and I was also met with a clean set of alternating lines on the screen!  At this point another quick test you can use to check the RAM is by closing the slam switch which is located on the inside of the coin door.  Your lines should shift on the screen and be free of flickering, garbage or anything else which points to faulty RAM.  Mine were clean and shifted just fine!  I meticulously cleaned all the ROM and inspected the sockets and then fired the game up – amazing – Sea Wolf was working!!! (or so I thought).

I confirmed power was making it all the way to the sound board without issue so my focus was on the sound board itself at this point.  I decided to re-cap the power and amplifier section figuring it couldn't hurt and in the long run would probably lead to cleaner sound (6 caps as pictured).  I also repaired all of the cracked solder on the molex connection.  After the caps were replaced I was going through the board and discovered the TIP31 was shorted and the LM354 amplifier was 100% dead.  Upon replacing the amplifier I was met with BLASTING sound and immediately had to turn the master control pot down!  Interesting enough there are many adjustments on the sound board so don’t think a sound is missing until you have gone through them all and ‘tuned them in’.  When I was confident I had adjusted everything the game was still missing the ‘dive’ sound (the sound associated with the PT boat) and the ‘ship hit’ explosion sound.  There is a quick test to help you in your diagnosis which can point you towards the daughter board or the sound board in order to find the fault.  On the 12 pin connector on the daughter board you can short pins 7-11 to ground one at a time an confirm the sound is present and working.  This is also great fun when you have not been able to play the game for a month but at least you can make some really cool sounds with it!  All of my tests proved the sounds were working just fine (the sound board is good and the signal was making it there) and I had a logic problem on the daughter board that was killing my dive and ship hit sounds.  Working backwards from the 12 pin connector there are a series of 3 IC’s that can lead to problems – G5, F5 and F4.  The only way to figure out what is going on is to check these chips with a logic probe and when a sound is being called for make sure the associated circuit is active.  My problem turned out to be F5 not generating the signal to go from low to high and then feed G5 for the dive and ship hit sounds.  So upon replacing F5 (74174) I finally had all of my sounds back!