Karate Champ repair log

I bought this game for my collection.

I had already Karate Champ player vs player but this one was the rarer first version , japanese revision titled Karate Dou.

The game was very dirty and rusty and despite being declared fully working, the sound was completely missing.

The seller proposed a refund by sending back the pcb.

Before taking this road I decided to give a try at repairing it since the schematics for this pcb are available on jammarcade.net (they are not the same as the more common player vs player!) and the hardware was pretty simple.

After cleaning it in the washer machine, I started the trouble shooting

I immediately noticed that all the 7 sound eproms (BE2o – BE26) and the ram beside them had no activity on the data lines.

So I probed the /CE line and it was stuck high for everything.

That means the devices are in standby mode and they cannot output anything.

With the help of the schematics I traced back the source of the problem to IC18, a 74ls138 who outputs were all stuck high despite the activity on the inputs.

 

After replacing it, I tested out of circuit and the programmer confirmed it was faulty

 

By replacing IC18 with a good one, the sound was fully restored.

Note: If you have Karate Champ player vs player which use the same adapter, only remember that the older Karate Champ uses also -5V for the pre amps. If you forget to wire it , you get a very noisy and hissing sound.