Black Tiger repair log #2

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Apr 142018
 

Got a Black Tiger for a repair which had a colour problem on some graphics

It lacked some shades of colour

I decided to look around the palette rams @6C and 6D until I found a fixed address line

Tracing back I found an 74ls157 @5D with an output stuck low.

After checking the inputs I found one of them stuck low and according to its truth table, the output is always low.

Tracing back I found a 74ls273 witth Q3 output low and D3 input oscillating.

Piggybacking a good one restored the correct colours.

After changing it , the game was completely fixed

 

Xexex repair log #2

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Apr 132018
 

Received from France this mint Xexex PCB:

The board was bought from Japan as working but when arrived there was a noticeable sound issue, a loud buzzing noise present also at lowest volume level :

Obviously the culprit was the ‘054544’ audio module.Electrolytic capacitors on it were already replaced but this was not enough :

Most likely the probem was on the underneath of the module so I removed it and installed sockets:

There was some corrosion on underneath but nothing really serious:

I decided to test the module on an X-Men PCB and it worked fine, audio was clean:

The technical reason why it worked  is that X-Men doesn’t use the pre-amplification circuit of the module (a LM358 OP-AMP is present externally on PCB) while Xexex does.So the problem was the 4558 OP-AMP on underneath of the module.I removed it and replaced with an LM358:

The buzzing noise was cut out:

Lastly I painted the module to finish the job:

 Posted by at 4:26 pm

Psychic 5 repair log #2

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Apr 102018
 

My beloved original pcb developed once again problems after the last repair log you can read here:

Psychic 5 repair log #1

This time, the overall colour palette was pinked and all text was missing

After some troubleshooting I found again a problem with a Fujitsu ttl 74ls08, same type and week/year of manufacturing of the one I changed on the old repair log!

 

After changing it, the game worked fine for some minutes and then it developed a new problem

 

Game lost sync and became bluish

Again I decided to concentrate on the only Fujitsu  74ls08 ttls which were present on the board until I found the faulty one.

Same week/year of manufacturing and same fault: dead outputs

In addition, I found another couple of Fujitsu 74ls08 which had dead outputs  and I decided to change all of them with good ones.

Now the game is 100% fixed but there are 3 more Fujitsu ttl waiting to be replaced. I ran out of parts otherwise I would have changed them immediately.

Lup Lup Puzzle PAL dump added

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Apr 092018
 

I dumped the PAL from a Lup Lup Puzzle PCB (a new revision that will be added in next MAME release )

PLD was a secured GAL22V10 at location GAL1 which I successfully reversed into same device.

 Posted by at 6:52 pm

Chopper I PAL dumps added

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Apr 082018
 

Muddymusic sent me a Chopper I PCB to look at.
There were 5 PAL’s on this board and all were soldered in so I had to desolder them to dump.
All the PAL’s were unlocked so these are native dumps in their native format.
They will need converted to GAL format to use in a GAL chip.

 Posted by at 2:58 pm