Devastators repair log

Received from Austria this Devastators PCB (manufactured by Konami in the distant 1988)

The board was constantly watchdogging sign that no valid code was executed :

Probing the HD63C09E main CPU revelead some address lines were dead:

I removed it :

Trying the CPU in another board confirmed it was really bad so I replaced it.The board booted up but it was failing the POST showing two bad devices which at fist glance I could not recognize due the complete lack of graphics :

Thanks to MAME I figured out they were the ones @C11 and C14 :

On PCB they are the two 2k x 8-bit static RAMs (Motorola MCM2016 used) which are part of the palette colors circuit

Probing the one @C14 revealed stuck data signals:

RAM chip failed the out-of-circuit testing:

Now the board booted into game but with severe graphics issue : the backgrounds had wrong colors and sprites were missing.Sound was absent too:

I dumped the four OTP MASK ROMs that store tiles data and found three bad ones :

But this made no real improvements.Board is almost fully populated with Fuitsu TTLs so I went to test them in-circuit with a logic comparator starting from this part of circuit which is involved in color generation  :

I found five bad mutiplexers with floating outputs:

This restored correct backgrounds:

I decided to troubleshoot for first the lack of sound.Found in rapid succession these bad ICs:

• YM2151 (with serial data output pin stuck high)
• sound RAM and ROM
• two 74LS74 @G5-F10

And a 74LS273 @B7 with some floating outputs:

Sound was back :

Now the lack of sprites.MASK ROMs check reported two bad devices @H4-K4 which are the ones  storing sprites data:

This particular PCB uses a bottom ROM board with sprites and audio samples ROMs :

But the top board can also host three 4Mbit devices for the same data so you can get rid of the ROM board :

This is what I opted instead of troubleshooting it since all the splitted ROMs were soldered in.I programmed three 27C400 EPROMs with MAME dumps:

The last issue I had to fix was releated to inputs, P1 UP was not working.Using schematics I quickly found and replaced a 74LS253 @E13 with a bad ouput :

Board finally 100% fixed and another battle won against Evil Konami and Fujitsu with this big booty: