Konami Boot Camp

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 along the top edges of the title logo and 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