Liquid Kids repair log #1

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Oct 312016
 

This game had two problem:

  • Glitchy and noisy sounds
  • Blocky background images

liquidk2

 

Given the high unreliablity of Taito maskroms I immediately tested the ones marked in red which with no surprice some pins not connected internally

 

liquidk

 

C49-04 restored the glitchy sound and C49-02 fixed the blocky gfx.

Replacements to be used are 27c400 (4mbit eproms with maskroms pinout)

Game 100% fixed

liquidk3

Toki repair log #1

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Oct 312016
 

Got this game for a repair which had all screen with washed out colours

toki2

 

This game has a SEIBU custom named UEC51 which is used as a DAC to output the RGB colours on the monitor.

The input pins were good, but a couple of output pins were fixed, thus creating the images as they had less shades of colours.

I took a good one from another Toki which had other faults and the problem was fixed 100%

 

toki1

toki3

 

Diet Go Go repair log

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Oct 312016
 

The game had two problems.

First one was the music that sometimes when switching on the game was glitched (very fast tempo or corrupted voices)

The first problem was fixed by replacing  capacitor C7 which was used to reset the chips and didn’t work correctly.

dietgogo

 

Second problem was some black pixels on some elements of the background.

dietgogo2

After shorting some data lines of the gfx maskroms I found the one responsibile for the background images.

Normally when a markrom fails you get blocky graphics. In this case was only some bad pixels.

Looking on the solder side of the pcb I immediately noticed one pin of one address line of the background image markrom touching the network resistance beside which forced the address line to 1.

diet3

Disconnecting it solved the problem

diet4

Avenging Spirit Repair log

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Oct 312016
 

Received this game for a repair.

The game had messed background images

avenging2

Shorting some data pins rams I found the one responsible for the tiles arrangement.

I replaced the one marked in red below and it was infact faulty but it didn’t fix completely the problem.

I noticed that the 74ls745 above it was pressed down badly like if it was hit but something.

I decided to unsolder it and test the continuity of all the pads and infact I found three of them (marked in red) that visually were OK but they had no continuity

with the other chips.

That meant that the internal pad was broken so bad it detached internally

avenging1

 

Making some ugly flying wiring with something I had at hand I tested the game which was fully restored

 

avenging4

 

avenging3

Double Dragon repair log #9

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Oct 292016
 

Yes, yet another Double Dragon PCB on the bench.

The board was in good shape:

100_8956

but it didn’t pass the self-test sitting on a ‘63701 ERROR:

100_8959

The /HALT line of the HD63701 MCU was asserted, this was sign of some trouble in its busses.I swapped a good chip with no change so I went to look at schematics.All was good until I found no continuity between the address line ‘A0’ (pin 50) of the MCU with pin 3 of the 74F157 @IC8:

hd63701_bus

Tracing back the address line I could figure out where connection was  interrupted, exactly under the 74F157 @IC7 so I removed it.Inspecting the involved area with a USB microscope revealed a corroded trace  :

bad_trace

I patched it with some AWG30 wire:

100_8979

With this fix finally the board passed the self-test but two issues were present in game : sound was missing and backgrounds had jailbars :

The first issue was due a missing 10Kohm potentiometer in the sound section:

100_8981

The backgrounds GFX data are stored into four 27512 OTP devices on video board :

bg_romsjpg

When I went to dump the ones @IC108 ans IC109 my programmer warned me about a bad contact on pin 19 (data line ‘D7’) of both :

 

27512ic109

Obviously the resulting dumps didn’t match the ones from MAME ROM sets so I programmed two 27C512 EPROMs as replacement.This restored graphics completely.Yes, yet another Double Dragon PCB fixed!

 

 Posted by at 11:46 pm