Corrado Tomaselli

No background in electronics. Learned everything by reading pdf books and expecially Video game logic Vol 1 by Atari and in general early Atari and Williams arcade manuals

Vimana repair log

May 062017

Got this pcb from a friend for a repair.

At first it showed a OBJECT RAM ERROR which was fixed by reflowing the custom BCU-2 which had some lifted pins.

At this point the game showed all the sprites with black pixels

After some trials, I could locate the circuit which draws the sprites.

There are 4x srams 6116, by piggybacking sram @12C ( marked in white on the below pic) the sprites were shown perfectly.

After exchanging it, I got another issue

From the above picture it is difficult to see, but on the upper half of the screen, the alternate lines of the sprites were displaced on the bottom side.

I was really puzzled and I was sure that something else got broken in the meanwhile.

After some days of blindly checking other parts of the circuits, I decided to probe the address pins of the very same sram I exhanged.

A10 and A9 were tied to ground on all 4 srams of the sprite circuit, while only A8 was floating on the sram @12C

The address pins were connected to some 74LS157 and all were working correctly.

That meant the trace A8 was somewhat broken underneath.

Fortunately I had another Vimana from which I noted to which 74ls157 output A8 was connected.

After fixing the connection, the games was 100% fixed

SEGA System 16 repair log #2

PCB Repair Logs, Repair Logs Comments Off

May 052017

I received this system 16 motherboard from an arcadeitalia member called Consoleman.

The motherboard was missing completely the sound and didn’t sync with the monitor.

After checking with my sound probe that the sound was really missing by probing the pre amps, I started to check the Z80 which was confirmed good and RAM which was faulty.

Changing the ram restored the sound completely.

The Sync problem was not easy to check because the TTL which outputs the signal to the finger board is under the romboard.

In anycase I managed to test it from the solder side and I noticed the composite signal was about 14khz, that is why was not syncing.

I proceeded to desolder it

and tested out of circuit with my programmer as good….

Instead of soldering the same part, I decided to find another 74Ls125 among my junk boards.

It was not common but in the end I found it on another board and soldered it.

Motherboard was 100% fixed.

Probably my programmer hadn’t enough sensibility to declare the part as bad. First time it happens.

Black Tiger repair log #1

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May 052017

A friend of mine sent this pcb to check why the background was all messed up

I immediately noticed in demo mode that all the characters fell down in an endless loop because they couldn’t walk on the platforms

After searching for the fault in the video board for some days, I decided to test all roms starting from the program ones.

Program rom 04 didn’t match with anything in Mame and after checking the pattern I saw it was full of garbage.

After reprogramming with a good dump, the game was restored perfectly.

It seems rom 04 has only the layout of all levels because even without its presence the game is booting

Flashgal repair log

PCB Repair Logs, Repair Logs 1 Response »

Mar 162017

I bought this game for my collection declared perfectly working.

Flashgal runs on the very same pcb of other two games developed by Kyugo which are 99 Last War and Legend.

On the bottom pcb it is silkscreened CVG-48C which is very similar to the codes used by ORCA on their hardware

Anyway it seems that in these days I am very unlucky because the game once fired up had a sync problem

Tracing back from the SYNC pin I came to a 74LS08@2P

With the frequency counter I got very unstable readings so I proceeded to piggyback it with a good 74LS08 which restored the sync.

After changing it, it tested good out of circuit, yet with the new TTL in place I got a stable sync….

The screen looked very reddish so there was obiviously a palette problem

I checked the palette rams and they were all good so I dumped the colour proms until I found the RED component one @1J which didn’t match anything in MAME.

The prom is an 82s129 and it is almost impossible to find an empty replacement these days.

Therefore I went again for the Bprom to Gal replacement already used last year in another repair log:

Mad Gear repair log

Since the prom was the very same type I replaced for Mad Gear, I converted the prom file to the PLD equations using Elgen tool U2pa and I reused the same pin configurations which fits nicely without any major hardware mod except a jumper wire to connect GND to the correct pin on the GAL

I tested the the game but I noticed something strange:

The colours were right but there were glitches on the left and right borders and also a flickering red component across all the screen (which cannot be seen on the static image offcourse)

At first I thought it was an access time problem with my GAL , therefore I burned the fastest one I had but no luck.

I tested directly the signals of the PROMS and found out that the CE pins were not tight to GND but were controlled by another ttl.

Soon it became clear why it didn’t work: the GAL was sending datas out of sync therefore producing artifacts.

Since I am not a programmer I asked to Elgen and Caius (who asked to Porchy) an advice how to replicate on the PLD a tristate behaviour.

All of them were very kind and in few minutes they informed me how tristate works on PLD equations

I added the needed modifications to my PLD equations by declaring each data pin enabled when pins CE1 and CE2 were low.

This completely fixed the colours on the pcb with no artifacts:

Again a big thanks to Elgen from https://elgensrepairs.blogspot.it/ for the invaluable tool and to Caius and Porchy for being always very helful

Senjyo repair log

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Mar 162017

I bought this game declared 100% working for my collection but as soon as I fired it up I noticed something strange:

One of the mountain layer looked very strange and there was also some stripes of mountains in the sky

This game has no schematics and it is a particular complex and populated hardware with lots of TTLS and rams.

The game is on a 3 layers pcb so I had to find a way to test the components in a confortable way:

The upper board with the connector has the cpu and sound section, therefore I started to test the bottom pcbs and by shorting some signals I finally found the circuit dedicated to the last parallax layer which is near eproms 19 and 20.

All the signals looked good but the 2114 srams has some dead signals coming to 4 addresses.

Tracing back I found a Texas instruments TTL 74ls157@9C whose outputs were all totally dead

Changing it fixed completely the background layer:

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