New PAL dumps still from our member Yves M.
This time we have the ones from a Osman/Cannon Dancer PCB (boards silkscreeneed as ‘DEC-22VO’ and ‘MT5601-0′ and manufactured by Data East).Dumps come from unsecured PALCE16V8H devices and have been successfully tested onto GAL16V8 targeting device.Thanks again to him for this contribution.
Got Muddymusic’s Helifire (not to be confused with Hellfire by Toaplan) to look at.
He bought the original cocktail cab and on first power up was met with nothing but a “loud noise”.
His initial checks were that his +5v line was reading +2.5v and sent me the PSU to work on.
Now due to the various AC voltages required to actually use the PSU I was unable to do any real testing so instead he sent me the transformer and PCB too.
Now I could start checking the PSU I found that the +5v line was indeed around +2.5v. While I had the PSU powered up I suddenly got a +5v voltage output and it was pretty solid.
I couldn’t check to see if the game was running at this point as I had no way to connect the game to a monitor so I probed the video out pins with the scope and everything appeared to be at least what I expected.
While I had the PCB hooked up to load the PSU I momentarily saw the voltage on the +5v line would drop to +2.5v and then to my horror rose up to +8v!
I immediately powered it down and it has not been back on since.
I opted to hook it up to a switcher but when I did I noticed the video sync output was missing. I guess the PSU took it out. I also noticed the 8080 CPU wasn’t running either and was getting quite hot.
I’ve got access to a thermal camera right now so checking the PCB with that revealed the 8080 in the top right corner was way too hot.
I had no spare 8080 CPU’s so placed an order for a couple and moved onto the missing SYNC signal.
Working backwards from the SYNC output and using the schematics available I quickly found the 74LS109 at location 3B had stuck outputs despite having good inputs and a healthy clock signal.
Replacing this chip gave me back my signals.
A week later my 8080 CPU’s arrived and I managed to get the video output hooked up to my Commodore 1084D monitor to test.
At the time I didn’t even realise that the game was black and white and uses a colour overlay so I was initially confused by the colour in the game but Muddymusic soon put me right on that.
Philmurr from the UKVAC forums was asking about a program to manipulate the bit order for address and data lines of a ROM dump.
I had the idea for manipulating data lines in the past when I was dumping the Arcadia ROM’s from Unigame but I never followed through with it until now.
Anyway I have now added support for this to my BINman program.
Its fairly self explanatory I think and it has been tested by Philmurr on his Scramble ROM’s and I did some testing with Arcadia ROM’s too.
Latest version is 3.6.2
Got another Konami game with the usual jail bars defect that is so common on these games
I ran again the maskrom test and it reported bad maskrom 8B.
After desoldering it and testing as 27c160, the programmer complained about missing contacts on several pins.
After replacing the markrom with a 27c160, the game was 100% fixed
I got this pcb for a repair.
Gameplay was fine but graphics had black lines and music had a lot of white noise.
I ran the maskrom check and it reported two roms as bad, one of which was infact the rom with the sound data.
It doesn’t mean necessarily that the maskroms are bad, can be also that the custom chips have some pins not soldered correctly or the chips themselves being faulty.
The only way is to desolder the maskroms and check on a programmer if it reports pins not connected which means that the chip internally is broken.
After a check with the romset, I decided to dump rom 16k as 27c400 (4mbit eprom with maskrom pinout) and rom 1d as a 27c800 (8mbit 16bit eprom).
Both were reported as having pins non connected properly.
So I replaced maskrom 16k with a 27c400 and the markrom at 1d with a 27c160 eprom (16mbit 16bit eprom) after having doubled the original file in order to prevent the game to access the empty space in case the additional addrr line is not connected to GND or 5V.
This fixed 100% the game
