Received from USA this Wonder Boy PCB for repair, actually the board was a factory conversion on Sega System 1A hardware:

When powered it up I got most of times a steady black screen, rarely an ‘ERROR ROM 4’ message:

I fired up my Fluke 9010A to perform a ROM test.On some devices sometimes a valid signature was returned but more often I got error and a different signature :

There are six program ROMs:

When I dumped them my programmer complained about some bad contact:

It turned out legs of some EPROMs were dirty and oxidized.After polished them the board booted up but  clearly a color was missing (the RED one) and GFX faults were present :

Doing a visual inspection I found a couple of broken 1K bussed resistor networks :

After checked connections I figured out they were used as resistor ladder in the palette circuit.I replaced them, this restored the three RGB colors and showed better the grahics faults:

Backgrounds had wrong colors and some sprites (like main character) had missing parts and vertical lines through.As for first issue I went back to the color circuit where @IC151 lies a TMM2016 (8K x 8-bit) static RAM (whose data bits are routed to some 74LS175 flip-flop and finally converted to analog by the above mentioned resistor ladders)

Probing it revealed a unhealthy signal on an address line (A10 ,  pin 19), here’s a comparison with a good signal on the left:

Sure enough I removed the RAM :

Device failed the out-of-circuit testing:

Now the sprites issue.Relevant data is stored in four 27128 EPROMs installed on a small piggyback board:

Devices were dumped as good.After a quick check with my multimeter I found a missing connection between a data line of a ROM and the header which goes into the sockets :

I restored the connection and this fixed board completely.Another repair accomplished.

Recently I was sent a TNX1 Sky Skipper PCB for repair from my friend, Whitney.
It had developed a sprite fault which looked like this

As you can see in some places the sprites look fine but as it scrolls they start to disappear and flash etc.
I had already done quite a bit of work with these PCB’s and the regular Popeye PCB too so was fairly familiar with the whole setup.
I knew the main RAM also held the sprite data too which the DMA circuit then pushed out to sprite RAM during VBLANK.
With this in mind I was sure the main RAM was OK and enabling the test mode also backed this up.
I checked most of the DMA circuit out which is mainly just counters and they all seemed fine too..

I moved onto the RAM PCB next. I could rule out the 82S09 SRAM chips straight away as they are all socketed and I have spares.
The 5501 sprite buffer RAM was a little more difficult to check. While I was probing about these RAM’s with the scope I found the voltage wasnt stable and fluctuated every few seconds a little and also there was a big volt drop compared to the output of the PSU.
I confirmed that with this RAM PCB unplugged that the volt drop went away as did the fluctuation of voltage.
I hooked up this PCB to my bench PSU on its own and monitored the current draw and voltage. I later pinpointed these issues to the RAM that I had swapped in to test. They were older ceramic types and clearly they were drawing a lot more current than the original. Swapping them back cleared this issue but obviously was not going to solve my problem.

Moving on the whats seems to be getting called the “timing” PCB I started probing the counters and found a 74LS161 which had weak looking outputs.

*note this picture was taken after being changed hence its in a socket

I piggybacked a new 161 on top but with the output legs bent out so as not to make connection then probed again.

I didn’t really think it would clear the problem but as there was such a difference I swapped it out anyway

After checking the game I had this

Game is all fixed.
Going to do some minor servicing on this and then send it on its way home.

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!