Recently, I posted that you should keep a cheapie network cable tester in your toolbox if you’re servicing modern games. Here’s why. 

I had a problem with the Stern Star Wars Comic Pro that I was chasing around for longer than I would like to admit. It started after doing an update. The customer had the game 3 years or so, and it still had the original code it shipped with. There were a ton of updates since then. He also had a Guardians of the Galaxy that he bought at the same time and still had its original code. 

I updated the Guardians without an issue, then went to update the Star Wars. The update went ok till it was time to update the node boards. Everything updated fine until it tried to update the cabinet node board. I was getting a message that the update failed.

I re-downloaded the update a few times to see if maybe something got corrupted, but nothing worked. I emailed Stern support, and they requested pictures of the LEDs on the cabinet note board, which I sent and also sent a video of the startup. They suggested the node board was bad which didn’t make sense since it worked ok before. 

I asked them if maybe it didn’t like all the updates and the tech said it was a possibility, but he wasn’t able to offer me any older ones to try rolling it back. So the next thing I figured was maybe the SD card got corrupted. I bought a new one, downloaded the image, and tried it out. No luck. Eventually I decided to pull the node board and put it in the Guardians, it took the runtime updates and worked fine so now I know I don’t have to tell my customer he has to shell out $200+ for a new board.

This whole thing went on for about 6-8 weeks due to having issues downloading the updates, getting back to the customers house etc. so by this time I’m pissed off. I pulled the network cable from the Guardians and put it in the Star Wars, son of a bitch, it worked. The node board updated and we were back in business. 

As a side note, I remember the customer saying something about the start button not blinking all the time and other odd things happening. After putting in a new cable all of those issues went away. 

If you’re chasing an odd problem around, test the Ethernet cables before going too far or buying unnecessary parts. If I had this tester with me that day I could have saved a lot of time and effort.