Aug 262017
 

This fantastic monitor has been on my test bench for as long as i’ve been in this hobby and its been a great little work horse.
I powered it up the other day to test something and noticed the upper half of the screen had what I would describe as thick scanlines whereas to lower half of the screen looked a little compressed.
I hooked up my NES to it and the problem was a lot more apparent

Keep you eye on Luigi when he jumps to the top of the screen. As he moves up he gets longer

Asking a couple of people quickly, they all recommended changing the capacitors. The ‘shotgun’ approach isn’t really something I like doing as I like to understand what would cause issues before I randomly poke around but monitors are not my strong point so I started ESR testing in-circuit.
All the capacitors I checked were perfect with really low ESR values and all the capacitance readings were within spec. All except for one little capacitor, C306. This is a 47uF 25v capacitor and is connected to pin 12 of the vertical deflection circuit (TDA1670A)

I tested the capacitor out of circuit and confirmed for sure it was actually bad.

With the monitor taken apart I hooked up the Muter BMR95 to the tube to check the condition of the guns
A tube can usually be identified by the label that is on the back of the tube

E2940B22 is the one we want. Next we cross reference this to the supplied manual to find which adapter we need to use.

Adapter 808 is the one we need for this tube.
All hooked up

The guns aren’t too bad and certainly no need to attempt any cleaning or rejuvenating. Sometimes this can cause more harm than good. I have a spreadsheet prepared too as outlined in the BMR 95 manual to give a better indication of the life expectancy of a tube but i’ve not included it here.

With all that done it was time to test the monitor again

All seems to be fixed again and im happy with that.
You can see the stretching better with a picture comparisson

Before

After

Never underestimate the importance of a single capacitor!

 Posted by at 2:34 pm

FixEight PAL dump added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on FixEight PAL dump added
Aug 252017
 

‘Rod_Wod’ sent in dump of the unique PAL from a FixEight PCB.Original device was an unsecured PALCE16V8H, dump has been successfully tested by him onto a same device and a GAL16V8 too.Thanks again to him.

 Posted by at 2:26 pm

Sky Kid repair log

 PCB Repair Logs  Comments Off on Sky Kid repair log
Aug 252017
 

A quick repair for this Sky Kid (Namco) I received some days ago :

Board was in near mint condition but it didn’t boot sitting on a semi-static garbage screen (which was looping sign that watchdog was active)

Most of the devices were socketed so for first I ruled out the many custom ICs present, they were all working.Then I tested the RAMs out of circuit.Two Mitsubishi M58725P (2k x 8-bit static RAM) failed (at different address location) 

Replaced them with compatible 6116 and board successfully booted with no further issue.Job done.

 Posted by at 1:49 pm

Mahou Daisakusen repair log

 PCB Repair Logs, Repair Logs  Comments Off on Mahou Daisakusen repair log
Aug 222017
 

A friend got a Mahou Daisakusen (japanese version of Sorcer Striker) board with faulty graphics.

It was playing fine with sound but there was an obvious color palette problem.

I started looking at signals around the color outputs of the PCB and quickly found weak signals on the 74HCT273 at location U12. Piggybacking the chip with a working 74LS273 fixed the colors immediately.

I replaced the chip… Board fixed.

Here is a picture of the PCB with the defective chip highlighted in red:

 Posted by at 4:09 pm

Nichibutsu High Rate DVD System PAL dumps added

 PAL Updates  Comments Off on Nichibutsu High Rate DVD System PAL dumps added
Aug 202017
 

We have some new dumps from an unusual arcade hardware called High Rate DVD, a DVD-based mahjong system released by Nichibutsu in different volumes, you can read more about here:

New arrivals 12/07/2017

256KB binary dumps have been provided by ‘system11’ on Dumping Union list, I took care of reversing them to GAL16V8 targeting devices.Each PAL (identified by a colored stripe or dot on chip)  is shared among more than a volume and other Mahjong games too, you will find info on database.Thanks to ‘system11 who also successfully tested dumps back on hardware.

 Posted by at 10:11 am