December 2019 – JAMMArcade.net

Desert Breakers repair log

Dec 302019

Bought a cheap Desert Breaker for my collection which the seller declared as having no sound.

This game is running on system18 hardware. Since the sound was totally missing I first tested the z80 which was good and then I desoldered the SRAM which was

a Toshiba @IC79 , normally very unreliable in comparison to other makers and infact it was faulty.

It fixed the sound but playing I noticed that some sprites had missing lines

This problem could be either the custom chip 315-5361 ( sprite generator ) or the srams connected to it ( IC21 and 22)

Since all the address line were good, I proceeded to desolder and test the srams which were infact bad bad.

Game was fixed totally

Asterix repair log #2

PCB Repair Logs Comments Off

Dec 202019

A fresh box of broken boards from Muddymusic arrived recently and Asterix was the first one I pulled out.
Here is the picture I was sent of what it does on boot up

That’s reporting a couple of bad RAM chips but when I did the visual inspection I saw what looks to me like some reflow work has been done in the past and been done badly too. Excess solder and a couple of lifted traces. There were also some bent pins.

I straightened out the best I could and patch a couple of traces too.
The game now passes it POST but I get this in game

At first glance this looks OK and I initially missed it until I ran the MASKROM check from the test menu and it reported a failure at 7K (no picture of this, sorry). If you look at the “ASTERIX” logo there are a few issues around the outline with blue parts.
Going back over those customs and checking all the pins individually I found one pin that needed reflowing. Doing this fixed all the issues.