Hello everyone, this won’t be much of a repair article but stay with me. This game is Konami’s Boot Camp. Actually this name is the name published in America – in Europe we know this game as Combat School. It is one of my favorite games. I thought it was the same between regions and bought the USA version, but there was a difference – the American version is played with a trackball, not a joystick. I will convert my board to play with a joystick at some point.
Here is the board I received:
The board was sold to me in “working” condition, but when it arrived I encountered a problem. At first, the RAM & ROM Startup Tests pass successfully and the title screen appears as it should:
But inside the game itself, there is random pixel corruption everywhere. The circled pixels on the flagpole shouldn’t be there.
Then, when positioning the board to start investigating the problem, I realized that a part of the board is very fragile because when I touched it, it fell off!
If you ask what this IC “UPA1452H” is for, I will quote you directly from the datasheet:
[i]“µPA1453 is a PNP silicon epitaxial Power Transistor Array built
in 4 circuits designed to drive solenoids, relays, lamps and the
like.”[/i]
I think this must be a component on this board that drives the trackball. Obviously this is a problem and I wanted to solder the IC back onto the board, but since the legs of the IC snapped off they cannot be soldered properly. So I used a header pin as a dirty and quick solution.
NOTE: Of course it won’t stay ugly like this. As I said at the beginning of the article, I will convert this board to a joystick version later on – when I do, this component will be removed in the conversion process.
After reinstalling that IC, now everything functions normally.
Best Regards
Oguz