frsj8112

Salamander repair log

 PCB Repair Logs  1 Response »
May 042018
 

Got this untested Konami Salamander from the UK

It was a little bit dirty, but still in good nick. No previous repair work and no broken traces.

First startup showed that the game was stuck in watchdog, so program code was not loaded correctly by the main 68000 CPU. But sometimes it would take longer to reset the watchdog and sometimes it also shouted out one of the speech samples.

So I first took out the program ROMs, shown below, and re-inserted them:

Now the game booted into ROM/RAM test. The screen is a bit garbled, but I could see when comparing to the test screen in MAME, that ROM6 was reported as BAD

I first verified the EPROMs against MAME and they were ok. So unfortunately there was a fault in one of the MASK ROMs. I had a Salamander board since before, so I just stuck the MASK ROMs from that pcb into this one to see if it booted up and sure enough it worked. The MASK ROM printed with 6108 was indeed not working.

As this is a MASK ROM, 1Mbit 28-pin, and not a standard EPROM, I remembered that system11 made a blog post about converting Salamander to the japanese version of Life Force. I have made that conversion as well, and still had some of the pcbs and flash roms.

So I just made one with the Salamander ROM.

And voila, the game is resurrected from the dead 🙂

 

No other issues, job done!

Battle Chopper repair log

 PCB Repair Logs  2 Responses »
Feb 202018
 

Hi everyone, I’ve been a long time follower of jammarcade.net for several years and I’ve received a lot of help and advice from both Porchy and Caius. A big thank you to you guys! 🙂

Caius then approached me and asked if I wanted to contribute with my own repair logs of the games that I have resurrected from the dead and I thought that would be fun 🙂

So for my first post I thought i would document the repair of a Irem Battle Chopper. Pretty obscure and rare game that is hard nails, as always when it comes to Irem games.

The PCB was in pretty good condition but was missing some color. It displayed mostly blue graphics and faint red and green.

Having worked on M72 hardware before, I knew that color output was handled on the middle board in the PCB stack.

I started with measuring the RGB signals on the JAMMA edge with my oscilloscope, I could verify that the signal of R and G were absent.

Having access to the R-type schematics, I checked where the RGB signals came before it arrived at the JAMMA edge.

 

As you can see it derives from the custom KNA91H014. Bad news I thought, but when checking the outputs with the oscilloscope, all the outputs looked fine. So I then started measuring the resistance of the resistor networks (RA13, RA14 and RA15) and they also checked out ok.

Everything in that areo seemed to be ok, so I started to look more into the schematics and found this on the same page as the snippet above

When checking the outputs of this 74LS38 at location IC67 with my logic probe, I could see that red and green were floating. And I could also verify that they were both shorted to ground.

I then desoldered the 74LS38 and could then verify it as bad in my TTL tester

These 74LS38’s aren’t that very commonly used on arcade pcbs, at least in my experience, so I needed to wait for a replacement to arrive. In the meantime I added a socket on the PCB for easier access for the future.

With the replacement in place, I booted up the game and lo and behold, all colors are back 🙂

A good and rare game back in its full glory.

Sega 171-5468 reproduction PCB

 Reproductions  Comments Off on Sega 171-5468 reproduction PCB
Jun 072017
 

A good friend of the site, frsj8112, has reproduced the MCU bypass PCB that Sega used on some of its games and he wanted to share his work.

The PCB’s can be ordered direct from OSHpark HERE

Huge thanks to frsj8112 for creating and sharing this. Im sure it will help many people out.

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