Where to start with this one.
My good friend brought this round a while ago with the fault of jailbars down the screen and no sound.
After messing around a bit we couldnt even get the game to boot on my setup no matter what we tried. He left it with me and ive been chipping away at it for a month or two now whenever I get time.
Ive finally got this thing up and running.
First this I found was two PLD’s, TJ-0 and TJ-1, were getting really hot.
As I have a couple of spare Caveman Ninja boards I did a swap and the game booted. Strange thing though, those PLD’s actually work in my other semi working board.
So now we have this

and no sound was present either.
Jailbars are usually a sign of a failed ROM so off the the tile ROM’s I go.
Found MASKROM MAG-02 had a few floating data pins. Replaced this for one off my scrap board and we get this

Graphics are back. Now onto the sound.
Looking first at the two OKI M6295 chips I could see neither of these were being enabled. If I pulsed the enable lines I could get various sounds to play. This tested the rest of the sound circuit so I knew it was good.
I traced the enable lines back to a 74LS138 decoder which wasn’t doing a great deal despite having what looked like good inputs. I removed this and it was indeed dead so replaced with a new one.

Still no sound though.
I could see the sound CPU and ROM were being addressed properly so next up was the RAM. On this board it was a TMM2063 chip. I could see activity on the data lines but it was struggling to drive them up to logic HIGH so removed that and that too failed a test.

I replaced it with a CXK5864 chip. Still no sound.

I started looking into how the sound section worked and found that the custom 104 protection chip is responsible for activating the sound.
I got in touch with a guy called Bryan who wrote the MAME driver and he gave me some nice information of its operation and basically pin pointed my issue to this chip.
At first I tried reflowing the pins but it made no difference so after a bit of debate with myself I took the plunge and removed the chip

I replaced it with one from my scrap board. WE HAVE SOUND!

And thats it, or so one would think. After about 2 minutes of playing this game, some of the sprites started to go a little crazy.

Going over the sprite ROM’s I found another one (MAG-06) with a floating data line. Replaced this with a spare and all is well once again.

Without a scrap board to take customs from this would have been one for the scrap pile.

I wasn’t originally going to write this up but seeing as though I won’t have much time free in a few weeks I thought I might as well.
So, this game would hang at the Q Sound check at startup. After a quick check I found why.

I straightened the pin and the game now works.

This came up on eBay the other day and thought I may as well have a go at repairing it.
According to the listing it failed its startup tests and the picture showed this too however when I got it, it passed all startup tests no problem.
So, here is what I was getting at first boot up

Picture is upside down and garbage on the screen during game. There is also no music but SFX are present.
I removed and reattached the ribbon cables and that gave me this

The video board on this has been messed with before with some pretty bad soldering and not so great wire links added.

There are a couple of points here that are completely trashed, luckily though these are not used so I can ignore them. I removed the links and remade them which brought the screen the right way round again and fixed some colour issues.

There is now clearly a problem with the sprites, every other line is missing. I recalled that my friend Elgen had the very same issue on his bootleg board so asked him what lines he patched. He sent me some pictures but unfortunately it wasn’t my issue. It did however point me to the correct part of the board.
At location IC84 is a TMM2018 RAM. I noticed when my hand was near this chip, some of the missing lines on screen would appear. Checking the outputs from this RAM revealed some weak signals.

These outputs fed into the 2 chips that Elgen had pointed out to me so that confirmed what I was seeing.
I removed the RAM and replaced it with a 6116 I had which then gave me this

All graphics problems sorted. Now onto the music problem.
Going from previous experience I knew where to look.
The YM2151 is responsible for our nice FM sounds. I could see the inputs pulsing away but the outputs at pins 19,20 and 21 were all stuck high. Replacing this gave me that oh so familiar music.

Job done