Porchy

Aug 272014
 

Game was dead on power up.
Pressing down on the crystal brought clocks back. Resoldering the crystal didn’t help so there must have been a break internal to the unit. I ordered a spare 18.432MHz crystal oscillator and waited for it to arrive.

The new crystal arrived and fitting it brought the main clock back however my monitor screamed at me.
Checking the output from the 082 custom chip on the scope revealed that the SYNC signal was around 24kHz.
wrongkhz

I originally thought the 082 was at fault as id seen so many of them go wrong before but after sleeping on it I started to think this unlikely. At this point I asked for a bit of help from forum user cmonkey. He knows a lot about Konami hardware and has provided a lot of insight to me in the past.
He very generously took some measurements off his Gyruss PCB and it confirmed that the clock input going to the 082 was too high on my board. It should be 6.14MHz into pin 13 and I was getting around 9.14MHz.
wrongkhz2

At this point I thought I would do a bit of circuit simulation and drew out the clock generation circuit in PSpice.
cc-sim1

This is how the circuit should be.
ccharlie-clock

As you can see from the simulation I have around 6MHz.
Probing around this PCB however revealed that pin 1 of the 74LS107 was dead. Removing this line from the simulation revealed this:
cc-sim2

Exactly what I was wanting to see.
I removed the LS107 and tested it. It failed as expected.
cc-107fail

I found one on a scrap board. This brought everything back to life.
ls107

Powering the board up initially gave me a static screen of 0’s. This is what you normally see during the start of the POST. Ill get back to this issue later.
Powering down and back up again gave me this:
rightclock

Using MAME I confirmed the Video RAM area was to blame.
Checking the address lines on the 8128 RAM at location 3E revealed 4 dead lines. I traced these back to 74LS157 at location 5E. Replacing this brought back the graphics.
almost

There is still a small graphics issue at this point which I struggled to find and also the intermittent power up problem I mentioned earlier so thought I would move on to the other issue of the controls not working.

Neither of the coin inputs work.
Back to the schematics, I can see where the signal comes in and taking some measurements shows there is something wrong as I’m getting around 1v at pin 6 of the chip at 3F.
There is very little to this part of the circuit and the resistor array looked good so I desoldered the 74LS253 and it failed all tests. Replacing this brought the controls back.

So back to my remaining problems.
First, the graphics issue. Its hard to describe but on the parts of the screen where the coloured dots cycle round this also affected half of the 8×8 tile above it.
IMAG0820

As it only affected half the tile I eventually came to the conclusion it was a timing issue. This led me right back to the beginning where the reset circuit lies.
The power on reset is generated by a 555 timer which goes through a bit of logic and eventually out to the rest of the board as a /RES signal.
cc-reset

This signal comes out on pin 8 of a 74LS08 AND gate. Working back I found I had no output on pin 11 at all. I desoldered this chip and replaced it.
IMAG0816

It fixed the reset problem but also fixed the graphics problems too
IMAG0821

I guess it could have been caused by a timing issue after all?

This board looked is VERY good condition and, looking at the edge connector, it cant have been powered up more than a handful of times so its interesting to see that all these problems were present.
Very pleased I got this fixed.

Spectral vs Generation sheet

 General  Comments Off on Spectral vs Generation sheet
Aug 202014
 

I was recently asked if I could scan in the manual (its not much of a manual, just a bit of paper) from my SvG.
Anyway here it is for anyone thats interested.
DOWNLOAD HERE

svgthumb

 Posted by at 4:26 pm

Decrypted FD1089 ROMs

 General  Comments Off on Decrypted FD1089 ROMs
Aug 192014
 

Runik is back and now he can decrypt FD1089 games.
The first two have been added (both Aurail sets).

As usual if anyone can test these files please let us know.
Any requests also please let us know.

Big thanks to Runik for making all of these. He has put a lot of work into making these for other people.

 Posted by at 5:17 pm

8086 PAL dump added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on 8086 PAL dump added
Aug 112014
 

Dumped and added the PAL chip from my Fluke 8086 POD.
The original is a PAL10L8 and has been converted and tested for a GAL16V8 device.

 Posted by at 3:23 pm

Dumping a NES cartridge

 General  Comments Off on Dumping a NES cartridge
Aug 112014
 

Recently I offered to help out someone wanting his Super Adventure Quests NES cartridge dumped.
I was quite surprised at first as I thought all NES carts had already been dumped but apparently not.

Here is the cartridge in question.
IMAG0749
IMAG0748

This is the same as the already dumped cartridge of Quattro Adventures. This was the NTSC release where as Super Adventure Quests was the PAL release.
The whole reason this dump in particular was wanted is because the NTSC release doesn’t work on a real PAL console using the Everdrive cartridge.

I got hold of this cart and decided the best and quickest way of dumping it was to desolder the ROM chip and read it out.
IMAG0754

I looked online and the very small amount of information I could find suggested it was most likely a 23C2001 MASKROM pinout. As my programmer has support for this device it should have been good to go.
Well it didn’t work so after mapping out the connections on the PCB it looks like the pinout is the same as a 27C020.
This worked just fine.

Copying the iNES header from Quattro Adventures and prepending it onto my ROM allowed me to load it up in emulators to check it.
nestopia

Job done. This has now been added to MESS.