Game booted and could be played but all the screen was full of garbage and flashing.
I found one of the two rams circled in red that was really hot. Data signals were weak so I decided the replace it.
I could now see some parts of the background, so I decided to replace also the other ram and the game this time was fully restored.
After receiving news that Eduardo Cruz had updated the code of the Kabuki Desuicider to support also the final games with eeproms that in the past didn’t work (Super Pang and Poker Ladies), I took my Poker Ladies board to desuicide it.
After reprogramming the Kabuki chip
I fired up the game but I was welcomed with a bad surprise:
I had corrupted graphic on some sprites ( title sprite and back side of the cards).
Luckily after locating the 2 chips responsible for the sprites, one of them ( @2J )had internal damage (programmer warned about missing contact on a data line)
The chip was a 1mbit maskrom but 32pin, that means I could do a 1 to 1 change with a programmed 27c1000 or equivalent without any flying wires.
Problem was 100% fixed
After 6-7 years years I decided to dig up my Centipede board (already repaired several times in the beginning) to make a play and I noticed that it was too quite.
Some sounds were present but something was missing…
After firing up Mame I immediately noticed that the sound missing was the centpede one!
After a brief looking at the schematic I understood that the Pokey chip was somewhat faulty.
Started the tone test and the channel 4 was silent.
Luckily I had a Missile Command lying around which was in very bad conditions but the Pokey was good!
So sound fully restored changing the Pokey chip @C3
Got this pcb to be repaired from a friend.
The pcb was working perfect excepts that the screen was flickering at 1/2 of the vsync.
As usual I visually inspected the board to find loose legs on smd chips but the only one present was good.
I noticed that the pcb had 4x rams 4164 near the video custom chip which are known to be not very reliable.
I started to probe the rams until I found one which had all the signals very weaks.
After soldering a new one, the problem was fixed!
Another pcb which was part of the cheap deal.
It was completely dead. Given that it is not an interesting game I was about to use it for spare parts when I asked my friend Caius if he ever repaired a Namco NA-1
He told me he once repaired one with a capacitor connected to the reset circuit of the 68000 which faulty and didn’t produce the reset signal.
I tested mine and to my surprise the reset was stuck low.
I changed the capacitor smd 22uF @C5 with one 1uF which I had available and the game booted.
Unfortunately the sound was completely missing, so I probed with my portable amplifier some smd capacitors which are know to be leaking very easily and I found one which interrupted the sound to the main ampli.
After changing it, the sound was very low with lot of background noise.
To end a long story short, I recapped many small smd caps with new ones and restored full volume.
This is a common problem with Namco NA-1 pcbs
