Where's the knob marked "VOL"?

Happy New Year!

WPC audio boards seem to be a lot harder to find now than when I got my first one for Doctor Who a few years ago. After I got the driver board and spare CPU for T2, I went for weeks without a nibble about audio boards. The pinball repair guy at league says that since no one's made a replacement for it, the supply is drying up. In December one showed up on eBay in the UK but with shipping the final price was over $100. But as luck would have it, one showed up domestically on eBay in the middle of the month, and I was excited to see that it had a terrible title that was not conducive to saved searches... "Williams funhouse pinball soundcard". It missed my "wpc board" and "pinball (sound,audio) board" searches... but luckily I managed to catch it in my Funhouse net. It was a three day auction and it hardly got any bids. So I swooped in at the last minute and nabbed it for just over $30 with shipping. It took a week to arrive, but that wasn't the seller's fault -- the Post Office seemed to just give up about halfway through the holiday season.

I finally got around to trying it out last night in Doctor Who. It was deja vu all over again, because my daughter was watching a Doctor Who marathon on BBC America in honour of David Tennant finally regenerating out of the role... it was just like the old days when I had first gotten the game, which I would work on while the show was on.

The auction had said that you couldn't turn the volume down more than half way with the board. When I plugged it in, I found that I couldn't change the volume at all. After some repair guide reading, the problem appeared to be a failure in the potentiometer chip that controlled the volume, and a quick post to rgp seemed confirmed that. Luckily, while waiting for an answer to the post I found that Marco carries the chips for about $6... I wish I'd known that a few days ago because I had just ordered some stuff, but there you go.

While I was testing the board in Doctor Who and before I had read that in the guide, I could tell that the sound was different, but couldn't pinpoint it. It turns out that there are two versions of this audio board, one that was used from Funhouse to Party Zone, and the other for the rest. The difference is in the resistors used to balance the speech and music... lucky for me, since the board came out of a Funhouse and is destined for a T2, since they use the same board.

And it turned out that my first pinball game of the new year was on DW while I tested the board. It was a pretty good game, too -- I killed off two rounds of Daleks on the first ball -- and it was strange because I was actually playing it half-heartedly from off to the side because I didn't want to move a parts cabinet that was temporarily parked there. I'm hoping that bodes well for my gameplay in the New Year...