Pacman PCB no sync signal

[philmurr]

You’ve mentioned three different incidents about finding “shortcut and shorted paths”. I assume this is all related when you fitted sockets? If it was me, I’d be checking all your socketed work again to make sure there’s not more shorted pins and/or broken tracks using the schematics and a multimeter checking the continuity between every pin you have worked on. It’s a painstaking task but to me it sounds like that’s where your problem is.

Agree with this. I've had a similar problem and it turned out to be some of the IC pins being too long and a couple shorting out on the solder side of the board.

No I can't remember which ones.