Whenever I encounter sound issues on Williams System 11 series games I always pull and verify the checksums on the sound ROMS first. I’ve fixed a lot of problems quickly just by doing this. Now I do this is for intermittent, missing, wrong or garbled sounds. Not for amplifier issues.

In the first video all sounds are good and present except 2 “I’m locked on!” and 3 “Nice shot Ramrod!” When I verified the checksums U21 was bad and I thought I had it. No luck, it still has the same problem.

Admittedly I threw a couple of darts suspecting the CVSD and DAC. If you don’t know what they are I’ll go into more detail on them and what they do soon.

Still no luck. At this point I’m running out of time for the day and the game is supposed to be getting picked up in a few hours so I grab another board and swap it out. I get everything plugged in and test the sound.

Still has the same problem. There’s only one common denominator. It’s not the background sound and speech board since I swapped in a known good one. It was the other sound ROM U22. I burned a new one and all sounds are good as shown in the second video.

This was just another one of those cases where things test good but are actually bad.