Received for repair an Hammerin’ Harry PCB on Irem M81 hardware (it can be found also on M84).

Set is made of a top CPU board:

And a bottom VIDEO board:

The PCB simply booted to a static garbage screen:

The NEC V30 (uPD70116) main CPU was active on its data/address busses but when I probed the program ROMs I found a couple of stuck address lines :

Looking at hardware I figured out there are some 74LS373 used as latches to address the program ROMs :

Probing the one @IC39 revealed some outputs were floating while inputs toggling:

Once removed the chip failed the out-of-circuit testing :

I replaced the chip and the board booted up but on self-test showed most of times  a ‘RAM NG 8’ message:

Then it entered in game which was playable with sound but background colors were wrong :

The ‘KNA91H014’ surface mounted IC on bottom board @IC1 generates the palette for this part of graphics:

Its pinout/implementation from R-Type schematics :

I made a visual inspection and found a couple of lifted pins on a row:

I reflowed the whole IC with result that self-test no longer complained and graphics were fully restored:

The last issue I had is that some inputs were not wotking but I quickly pinpointed it to a missing custom resistor array near the JAMMA edge connector:

 

Having no spare I replaced it with a reproduction of mine:

Repair accomplished.

Received for repair from Germany a ‘1943 : Midway Kaisen’ PCB (same hardware of export version ‘1943 : The Battle of Midway’ but with japanese ROM set).

Set is made of a CPU board :

And a VIDEO board:

The board was faulty, it showed graphic errors and had no sound :

Specifically the graphic faults concerned the text (also called “characters”), the scrolling and the sprites.Let’s go in order.

 

• The text/characters issue.

The text had wrong colors, here is how it looked like:

 

Whereas it should have been (snapshot from MAME)

Schematics in hand I started to check the revelant circuit with my logic probe and found a stuck signal on an address line of the BPROM @7F on CPU board:

This signal is labeled ‘CC3’ on schematics :

I traced it back to the input (pin 8) of two 74LS273 :

 

Signal was toggling on the one @5E but absent on 6E:

There was clearly a broken trace somewhere between pin 8 of the two 74LS273 so I ran a jumper wire on solder side, this restored the correct text :

 

• The scrolling issue.

The problem showed itself like some of the backgrounds (like clouds) were fixed  :

Looking at schematics there are on VIDEO board two separate circuits for horizontal and vertical scrolling.Checking them I found a 74LS273 @2H with stuck ouptuts :

I removed the chip and tested it out-of-circuit, it failed as expected:

I installed a good IC and scrolling came back to normal.

 

• The sprite issue.

Most of objects were fine but some of them (like bullets) sometimes turned into squared blocks:

Sprites data are stored in eight 27256 OTP ROMs:

I read them and dumps turned out to be good but as further proof I swapped the devices one by one with a good set from another same board.When I swapped the one @10A labeled ‘BM06’ the issue disappeared so I programmed a blank 27256 EPROM.Sprites were fine now but there were still some little glitches affecting them :

The sprites line buffer is made of two identical circuits called “LINE BUFFER 1” and “LINE BUFFER 2” in the schematics.Two 2K  x8-bit static RAMs (TMM2018) are the main part of this circuit :

Probing around I found nothing of abnormal but I noticed that a 100pF ceramic capacitor was installed between pin 20 (/OE tied to GROUND) and pin 21 (/WE)  of one RAM whereas the other chip lacked of it (but I could see some solder residuals so perhaps the capacitor was present but then came off)

I installed the missing capacitor and this cleared the glitches,  sprites were perfectly displayed now.

Last issue to troubleshoot was the lack of audio.The 1K potentiometer was missing :

Fitting it did not restore the sound, the fault was in the digital part of the circuit made of a Z80 CPU, a 27256 ROM and a 2k x 8-bit SRAM (Toshiba TMM2015)

The ROM was dumped as good so I fired up my Fluke 9010A troubleshooter and launched a RAM test which reported an ‘R/W ERR @ C000 BTS 02’ of the TMM2015 @1K  :

This means the Fluke encountered an error at address 0xC000 (the start of the Z80 address space where the RAM lies) where it was unable to read/write ‘bit 02’ which turned from hex number to binary is ‘00000010’.Translated into hardware this means that data line ‘D1’ of the TMM2015 SRAM was not working hence chip was likely faulty:

I pulled the RAM:

Chip failed the out-of-circuit test :

Fitting a good RAM chip restored the sound and fixed the board completely.Job done.

 

 

Received from Portugal a cocktail version PCB of Indiana Jones, a real “holy grail” given its rarity.The peculiarity is that it runs on a different hardware than usual Atari System 1.Board is a two stack one made of a ‘main’ PCB :

And a ‘cartridge’ PCB :

All I got when I powered it up was a flashing ‘NO CARTRIDGE’ message on screen, watchdog was active and board resetting in an endless loop:

I started my troubleshooting with some preliminary things like reseating chips and ribbon cables.This worked in some way because it shutted down the watchdog and put the board in a static red screen :

Despite this state I was able to enter into TEST mode and perform all checks that were successfully carried except for the sound test which failed reporting this error :

The sound CPU is a 6502 located on cartridge PCB:

I replaced it with a good one and board booted into game.All seemed to be working fine, game was full playable but in a comparison with MAME I found that speeches were missing on my board

Here is how it should play:

I went into TEST mode and launched again a sound test.Music chip (YM2151) and Effects chip (POKEY) were tested good whereas the Speech chip test was silent:

The Speech chip is a Texas Instruments TMS5520:

Most of pins were inactive so,having a spare I replaced it but with no luck.Looking at schematics the TMS5520 exchanges data with the SY6522A (VIA, Versatile Interface Adapter)

I could not see anything else involved in the fault so I ordered the part which came into mail after some time:

I installed it and speeches were restored, board 100% fixed.Repair accomplished.