I haven’t written a repair oriented post in quite a while. I figured I’d better document this one while it was still fresh in my mind.

The problem was a Stern CPU board out of a Spiderman that was draining the battery quickly. This era of board is Stern’s SAM system that was used from Pirates of the Caribbean until Wrestlemania, which was the debut of the Spike system.

A quickly draining battery usually involves the board’s clock or RAM. These are what the battery supplies power to when the game is powered off. The area we’re interested in is this section of the CPU board schematics: