Received today from Germany this Guardians PCB, also known as Denjinmakai II, a horizontally-scrolling beat-em-up released by Banpresto in 1995)

According to the owner the game played totally ‘bind’.I could confirm it as soon as I powered the board up :

But, as you can see from above video, I was able to restore some graphics by pressing down this surface mounted custom ASIC (QFP 208 pins)

Judging from the heatsink on its top this custom ASIC acts as a GPU generating most of the graphics and video signals too.At a closer inspection I found many lifted pins on all four sides.An example :

I promptly reflowed the IC, this gave me a steady picture but all the graphics were scrambled and, judging from the blueish screen, the RED color was missing too :

Looking at solder side of the PCB I noticed a long and quite deep scratch passing across some traces:

Inspecting the area with a microscope and doing a continuity check with my multimeter confirmed that some traces were severed and other caused unstable contact:

I patched and reinforced the traces with some AWG30 wire :

This lead to few improvements, graphics were still scrambled so I moved on to troubleshoot the lack of RED color.This was pretty easy to fix as the board had a quite clear damage that broke the trace which carries the signal to JAMMA edge connector :

As for bad graphics, I decided to double-check the previously reflowed custom ASIC and found a solder bridge shorting two pins:

Removing it fixed the issue and board completely.Repair accomplished.

Got from Portugal this Out Zone PCB, actually a low-budget korean version :

At visual inspection the board lacked of two 6116 SRAMs (but sockets were installed)

After fitting them I powered the board up and I got the usual black/white wavy striped screen but no boot into game, 68000 main CPU got stalled right after :

Multiple could be the reasons, in particular this Toplan hardware requires the sound circuit to be running otherwise the whole system can’t be initialized.A Z80A rules the sound system :

When I did piggybacking on it I got a ‘SUB CPU ERROR’ message on screen :

Once removed the IC I had confirm that it was really bad.With a good Z80 the board successfully booted into game but sprites were all blocky (it seems this is a common issue of this hardware…)

Sprites data are stored in four 1Mbit 28 pin MASK ROMs :

Devices were soldered in on my board and not socketed like usual so I was forced to remove all of them for dumping.Two of them gave different CRCs at each reading :

Specifically the ones marked ‘ROM1’ @1B and ‘ROM4’ @1L :

I replaced them with two 32 pin 1Mbit non-JEDEC EPROM devices.All seemed fine but while playing the game I noticed some sprites (like explosions) had lines through :

Looking at hardware I figured out that the sprite line buffer is made of four 6116 (2k x 8-bit) static RAMs:

 Probing them with a scope revealed some dead outputs of the one @12L :

The chip failed the out-of-circuit testing:

Installing a good RAM chip finished the job.Repair accomplished.

Received for repair this original Wonder Boy III – Monster Lair PCB (on Sega System16B hardware)

Board booted into game but sound was missing and some objects glitched :

I decided to troubleshoot for first the lack of sound.The amplifier was previously replaced as well as some electrolytic capacitors:

Using my audio probe I could figure out that the lack of sound was not caused by a fault in the analog circuit but it had a digital nature so I went to check the relevant circuit made of a Z80B CPU, a 6116 SRAM, a ROM and a YM2151 (plus a UPD7759 for speech samples) and I found that pin 15 (data line D5) of the RAM was silent as well as on the respective data bit of the Z80 and the YM2151 :

But it was toggling on the ROM (a 27C512 EPROM) which lies on ROM board :

 There was clearly a broken trace somewhere so I run a jumper wire from the RAM to the ROM:

This restored the sound.

Now the sprites issue.Relevant data are stored in eight 27C512 on ROM board :

I dumped the devices and my programmer complained about a bad contact on pin 9 of the EPROM @B2 and pin 16 of the one @B7:

At a closer inspection it turned out the pins were cut so they didn’t make a good contact into sockets:

I rebuilt the pins and this fixed the sprite issue.Board fixed.