Namco Rompers repair log

I’ve had this board in my collection for some years and I’ve made some repair work on before (replacing the cus120 on the CPU board, might put up a repair log on that as well).
I was going through my PCB collection and found that the game would not boot, there was only a black screen and not even the usual klonk sound as Namco System 1 games usually do.

Started with the basics, probed the Program ROMs with my logic probe and I did see some activity on the address and data buses.

Decided to dump the Program ROMs and verify them and they turned out to be ok.

So I started to probe the address and data buses again and found an address line (A2) that was stuck low.

Traced this line back to a 74LS244 at E10

74LS244 is a buffer and according to the Pac-Mania schematics, pin 14 is the output which has its input at pin 6 and there was activity there

This made me quite certain that the 74LS244 at E10 was bad.
But just to be certain, I removed all Program ROMs and the Custom key chip, so none of them would interfer.

And the fault was still there.
I quickly desoldered the 74LS244 and tested it with my tester as bad

I soldered a socket in its place and replaced the IC with a known good one and now the game booted up again