Another PCB from Olly. Not sure if this is a bootleg or not but it is certainly of lesser quality than the other Double Dragon boards I’ve had.
Anyway, on boot up we get this mess but at least it boots

I pulled all the ROM’s on the video board to start with and found the 4 tile ROM’s dead.

I replaced these with 27C512 EEPROM’s which then gave me this

Much better but all the sprites are missing.
Looking at the schematics I could follow them through testing from the ROM’s onwards.

I ended up at a 7425 where all the inputs were active but the output on pin 8 was dead

I replaced this and tested again. All the sprites were back on the title screen but the in game sprites had coloured blocks around them.

Seeing as though I had 4 dead ROM’s I decided it wasn’t too ridiculous a thought to think that some of sprite ROM’s were dead too.
After confirming that the sprite ROM’s were being selected correctly I pulled them all and checked them.
I found 1 dead ROM here

Again I replaced it and tested

All graphics now fixed, the sound however was a different story.

The sound effects were all messed up but I could hear the music was fine in the background.
I pulled the two PCM ROM’s and tested them. Both failed.
Replaced these too and tested

All fixed.
7 dead ROM’s and 1 TTL. Not sure whether the ROM’s are just getting too old now or if they were taken out by a voltage problem.

Received from Austria this Heavy Barrel PCB, a run and gun arcade game released by Data East in 1987 :

Board was in really good shape and game was fully playable too but lacked of sound :

Using an audio probe revealed no sound came out from analog circuit hence the fault was of digital nature.Audio system is ruled by a 6502 CPU located on top board :

Its pinout :

Checking it with a logic probe revealed that the /NMI line (pin 6) was asserted as well as two address lines were stuck low (A12 and A14)

A non-maskable interrupt triggered is usually due to some hardware failure hence for first I dumped the ROM containing the audio code (located on bottom board), it turned out to be good.Then I focused on the RAM accessed by the 6502, a 8K x 8-bit device (6116 compatible)

As soon as I piggybacked it with a good chip I got some random sounds played.The scope revealed weak signals on some data lines of the RAM (a good signal on the left of below picture for comparison)

I removed the IC :

And sure enough, it failed the out-of-circuit testing :

New chip fitted :

Sound was thus restored and another board fixed.

Today I received this Arkanoid PCB from Rich.

I was told the fault was with the sprites not being visible.

Visual inspection showed a pretty grubby looking PCB that has clearly had some work done before by the looks of it.

It also had this wiring harness soldered directly onto two pads of the edge connector. It was only 2 but I really hate this.

I fired the PCB up and sure enough I had the exact issue

Before receiving this board I had decided where I was going to look for the fault. After probing for a few minutes I was sure I was in the right place.

All these outputs were barely toggling so I went ahead an removed it.

As I had similar issue on my last Arkanoid repair I had a decent stock of spare 669 IC’s. New one fitted and another Arkanoid fixed.