Got this Explosive Breaker PCB (an unusual shoot’em up from Kaneko) from Portugal for a repair.Board was in good condition but showed some sign of previous rework especially on SMT devices :
On power up the self-test seemed to be successully performed but then an error occured and the board resetted in an endless loop:
Inspecting the board I found that the custom IC marked ‘VU-001’ (involved in Serial EEPROM and dispwitches handling) was burning hot :
The IC seems to be used on very few other Kaneko PCBs but we looked around and found a donor (Magical Crystals, a maze game) which runs on identical hardware:
I replaced the custom with the spare :
Board finally booted into game but screen was blueish:
A predominance of the blue color means that red channel has troubles or is missing.The RGB colors come from the emitters of three NPN transistors:
Probing the base of the red transistor revealed no signal hence the problem was upstream:
The base is tied to the nearby custom marked ‘699205P’ .
As said before all the SMT devices were previously reworked, also this one showed signs of hot air reflow.Inspecting it with a microscope revealed a solder bridge shorting two pins:
I fired up my soldering iron and removed it, this restored the correct colors and fixed board competely.Job done.
I had this original Silkworm PCB (manufactured by Tecmo in 1988) in a trade some years ago :
I didn’t know the status of the board since I never looked at it.Quite confident I powered it up but I was immediately disappointed, a solid static blank screen was all I got:
While I was visually inspecting the board I noticed the 28 pin brown SIL hybrid module marked ‘MA7053’ was a bit wonky:
I slightly wiggled it and it fell off:
I installed some 1.778 female pin headers on the PCB:
and patiently soldered the component on a strip of correspondent male headers:
In this way I got the board booting but with severe graphic faults.Color were wrong, sprites flashing (it’s hard to capture this issue with a camera), vertical lines through screen :
I decided to troubleshoot the sprites issue for first.Studying the hardware I figured out that the line buffer is made of twenty 4164 (64K x 1-bit) dynamic RAMs located on VIDEO board :
Some of them were extremely hot to touch and many showed stuck bit on output:
I pulled them all one by one:
Nine of them failed the out-of-circuit testing:
The graphics were correctly drawn now but the colors still wrong :
Tracing the three colors back from JAMMA connector I figured out the final part of the RGB DAC circuit where I noticed the lack of three resistors @R10-R8-R12 :
I compared my PCB with some pictures online and I had confirm that the three resistors were really missing on my board:
I didn’t know the correct value of these resistors and schematics were not available so I looked at Rygar ones which runs on similar hardware, they were 120 Ohm as part of the R-2R resistor ladder circuits used as RGB DAC:
I installed the resistors :
This fixed board completely:
Mitsubishi ‘MA7053’ reproduction
After repaired the PCB I thought this was a good chance to study a replacement of the ‘MA7053’ custom SIL.As often I do in my reproductions I looked at how possibly the custom was re-engineered.I could find two replacement daughterboards.One used on a bootleg PCB :
The other one was from an original Tecmo board (pictures kindly provided by ‘monsterlair’, thanks again to him)
Design were slightly different but they both have same functionality.Technically speaking the ‘M7053’ provides interface between the Z80 main CPU data bus and video memory latching data too.After figured out schematics of the two daughterboards I re-engineered them with surface mounted devices ending up with this result :
Installed on PCB for testing:
Both designs perfectly works on my newly repaired Silkworm :
The ‘MA7053’ is used for sure on these PCBs:
Gemini Wing
Rygar
Silkworm/ Back Fire
But it could be present also on other Tehkan/Tecmo boards so any addition is welcome from all of you arcade collectors/enthusiasts.
Received from Germany this mint Liquid Kids PCB (on Taito F2 hardware) for repair:
Board was working fine except for sprites, they had jailbars through:
First of all I dumped the two 4Mbit MASK ROMS which store sprites data, they turned out to be good.This part of graphics is almost entirely generated by a custom ASIC marked ‘TC0200OBJ’ which showed some sign of previous rework on my board :
We can see pinout and implementation of this custom in the Final Blow schematics :
Probing with a scope its outputs data pins revealed some unhealthy signals (shown on the right on the below snapshot, good on the left)
PCB Repair LogsComments Off on Air Buster : Trouble Speciality Raid Unit repair log #2
Sep172018
Another shoot’em up on the bench and still a PCB received from Portugal.This is the time of Air Buster – Trouble Speciality Raid Unit- released by Kaneko in 1990 .
Board booted to a static grey screen :
Touching the board while powered on I found the IC @D21 was really hot :
The IC is a Nec uPD41101C, a 910-word x 8-bit high-speed line buffer :
The data outputs pins were all stuck low:
I removed the chip and replaced it with a compatible uPD42101 :
The board sprang to life with the power on self test which reported all RAM/ROM devices as good:
But it kept to reset and restart again the POST in an endless loop.Randomly the board gave an error related to the SUB CPU which was generating a not maskable interrupt (NMI)
There are three PLDs on board and the one marked ‘PR-501A’ is involved in SUB CPU circuit :
Probing it revealed some of the outputs were stuck low, they showed few Ohms of resistance to GROUND compared to typical values:
I pulled the IC and read it in my programmer, although the device was protected this would have give me an idea about its functionality.I got a read error which confirmed that it was really bad :
Luckily we have dump of this PAL in our database so I burned the JED in a GAL16V8 and the board finally booted into game.But colors were wrong and sound absent :
The lack of audio was due to a missing OKI MSM6295 and YM3014 DAC:
As for colors issue, piggybacking the two 2k x 8bit palette RAMs lead to some improvement :
So , since the RAMs were also from Sanyo manufacturer (not really reliable in my experience) , I pulled and replaced them although the chips were tested good out-of-circuit.This fixed the issue and board completely.
Bought this game for personal collection with a problem on the RED colour which was completely missing.
Checking the schematics there are some 74541 chips which are sending the colour bits to a resistor network for Dac conversion. The one on the red colour @UC4 was correctly working so I checked the 74ls07@UA4 involved in the blanking circuit.
Pin 2 was always below 0.5V and muted the total red colour
