Today I’ve dumped the only PAL from a Fighting Fantasy PCB, a weapon based fighting game from Data East released in 1989 (the game is also known as Hippodrome outside Japan).Dump has been successfully tested in a GAL16V8 targeting device.
Another Rainbow Islands PCB to repair.
This one had issues with the sprites which were broken up and seemed to be repeating, looked very much like a stuck bit on the sprite addressing;
All tiles and background graphics were fine, so I knew it was something to do with the sprite circuit.
The first thing I did was to look at the area where the sprite data is read from the two eproms. The two 74LS244 buffers checked out fine, but one of the 74LS373 Octal Latches had an output pin stuck HI (pin 9);
So I desoldered it;
I confirmed the Octal Latch was bad in an IC Tester. So I soldered in a socket and replaced with a fresh Octal Latch;
PCB sprites now restored;
We have some new PAL dumps.In the last days Porchy dumped PALs from an unemulated D.D. Crew bootleg board (it will be included in next MAME release), devices were two unsecured GAL16V8.Thanks to him.
Today I’ve dumped the PAL from an original Cabal (TAD Corporation) and successfully tested it on a GAL16V8 targeting device.
Sometimes lightning does strike twice.
I was recently sent an Asteroids Deluxe PCB which was exhibiting corrupted vectors.
When I got the PCB, I put it on my test rig and was presented with the following in TEST mode;
GAME mode;
The symptoms were pretty much identical to the last Asteroids repair log I posted. Note however this is an Asteroids Deluxe, however it is pretty much identical hardware to Asteroids except that Asteroids Deluxe has a pure digital sound circuit via a Pokey chip (Asteroids is analogue and no Pokey).
I immediately probed the 74LS42 decoder at E6, which had two outputs stuck HI.
So I desoldered it;
Tested it in my IC tester;
Socketed and replaced it with a fresh decoder;
Fire her up again;
Now working, except that the PCB would sometimes crash or refuse to boot. I was able to determine that three of the six ROM sockets were worn. So I replaced all of them for reliability;
Now working 100%.
I recently received some faulty Capcom pre-CPS PCBs.As most of you know, these board are well known to commit suicide.As you can read from the Dead Battey Society site, “the way suicide work is that the batteries on board supply power to a bit of RAM that holds a decryption table. This table is the key to decrypting the encrypted program stored in the board’s ROMs. When the battery dies, this table goes away and the program code can no longer be decrypted. The CPU no longer has valid code to execute. The board stops working”.
In particular Capcom pre-CPS boards all use a single 3.6V battery and a custom Z80 marked “Kabuki”.The Kabuki has the RAM with the decryption table built right into it.
My Poker Ladies PCB committed suicided and all I got was a static blue screen:
After reviving it with the use of patched ROMs available from the Dead Battery Society site and doing some modification on PCB (thanks to Corrado for providing me info), the board successfully booted but showed sprites issue:
EPROMs containing this part of graphics were reafd fine so my first suspicions were on the custom sprites generator marked “86S105” (84 pin PLCC package) which addresses the devices :
I played the card of its replacement taking a spare from a shorted Block Block PCB:
and I won since sprites were fully restored:
