I received a very nice condition Gradius II: Gofer no Yabou pcb from my good friend Robotype. It was sold to me as faulty, described as “the drums are missing from the audio”. The game showed up, and YUP, the drums are certainly missing!

This was an ESPECIALLY odd fault. In my experience, the Background Music and Samples either work or they do not work. I have never seen working, but instruments missing! I started with the logical audio failure points… YM2151  FM synthesizer (tested OK), YM3012 Digital Analogue converter (tested OK) and finally the UPC324 Op Amps (also tested OK). With all of the major audio failure points checking out OK, I decided it was time to try a more aggressive strategy. I turned to the mame source, and determined Konami Custom ‘007232’ is responsible for audio generation. This seemed like a good starting point… luckily for me, my scrap X-Men PCB had this IC present. Time to remove and swap the IC!

SUCCESS! The newly fitted ‘007232’ custom Konami Audio IC did the trick, the drum line is fully restored and the BGM is back in all of its awesome glory. Job done!

Let me preface this by saying I’ve been really lazy about blogging my repairs this year. I found some free time today and decided now is a good time to post some of my accomplishments. All of the following repairs were performed through out 2016, but not documented until now. Enjoy!

I received a faulty Simpsons PCB off of ebay for a reasonably good price. It was sold simply as not working with the faults not described. Upon receiving the board, I observed it was in very good condition and a worthwhile repair candidate. When I fired t up, the graphics were REALLY bad! As you can see, the backgrounds and most of the sprites are missing:

I was able to run the rom test and self test, all IC’s reported as good (so I was confident there is not a ram or rom issue at hand). I turned to the mame source code to better understand what each of the Konami Hybrid IC’s are responsible for in the graphics section. I learned that 053247 and 053246 are responsible for sprite generation, and decided they would be a good starting point. Fortunately I had a dead XMen parts-PCB with both of these Custom IC’s present. I started by swapping 053246 with the donor from XMen. As you can see below, we’re getting better! But its still not fixed… Backgrounds are rendering but the sprites are now missing.

I decided to move on to the 053247 IC, and attempt swapping that next. I learned that these IC’s work in tandem, and if one is bad, there’s a chance the other is also bad.

With both IC’s changed from the donor Xmen board, all graphics are restored!!!

Repair complete, game now plays 100%. I don’t dare imagine the abuse this PCB received that took out BOTH custom IC’s, but I’m glad its ready to play on. Another gem saved from the scrap bin!

I bought a really trashy copy of Xmen Children of the Atom off of eBay out of sheer curiosity. The auction’s description indicated that the B board was bad, and had caused the previous owner’s power supply fuse to blow. WHOAH! Sounds like more than just the normal suicide issue most “dead” CPS-2 boards have. I decided to take a gamble and won the auction for a whopping $8.

Upon arrival, I opened the PCB and was greeted by an old abandoned mud-wasp nest. GROSS! I gave the PCB and shell a good bath to get all of the nest remnants off of it. At a first glance, outside of being dirty, the PCB looked to be OK. The original battery was still in place, and read 0.0v (thankfully it did not leak). Clearly this board had suicided. I decided to try out Razoola’s suicide tester in rom socket 3 (very handy). When I booted up the game, I could hear the 1st track of the audio playing (a good sign), however the diagnostics that should display were COMPLETELY blank. I had an entirely black screen.

At this point I decided it was worth while to try the decrypted Xmen program roms on my PCB, just to see if I got any signs of life out of the B board. After installing the Team Avalaunch decrypted rom set, the game would boot, eventually show the “mild animated violence screen”. After displaying that screen, the CPS2 would hang, reboot and repeat. No other sprites or text would display outside of the animated violence screen and it would not progress past that portion of the demo loop.

I took the board into direct sunlight to see if I could find any discreetly burned components. Sure enough, the diode at position D1 was burned clear in half. Replacing it did not have any effect on my symptoms, however it did give me a clue that a major power fault had occurred on the board. Previous experience with the CPS2 told me that the issue was more than likely due to a bad custom capcom IC. Also from previous experimenting and experience, I know the custom Capcom IC DL 1927 (CGA) at position 7M is partially responsible for graphics generation. Since that was pretty close to the burned diode, this became my prime suspect.

I pulled a parts CPS2 B board out, and decided to attempt swapping the QFP120 DL 1927 IC.

MUCH to my surprise, after swapping the IC and verifying there were no bridges or floating pins, Xmen fired RIGHT UP. All graphics restored. Not bad for an $8 eBay pickup 🙂

In retrospect, I think the original owner may have put the Jamma edge connector on slightly misaligned, and sent 12v down the 5v power rail, taking out diode D1 and the QFP at 7M. Another great Capcom game has been preserved!