Received today this Silent Dragon PCB (a not so well known beat ’em up manufactured by Taito) that I bought as faulty :
According to the seller board played fine but sound was absent.He was right:
Some one tried to replace invain the audio amplifier:
A quick check with my audio probe revealed the issue had a digital and not analog cause.So I went to probe the Z80 audio CPU and found its /INT line always asserted:
This means a maskable interrupt to the CPU was triggered by an external I/O device.This causes execution to jump to a specific interrupt vector (which is some code at a fixed location).Execution can then continue after the interrupt vector routine has finished but in my case the /INT line was LOW all the time so the CPU was not properly running.
A further check revealed pin 21 /RD and pin 22 /WR were shorted each other:
I turned the board over and did a visual inspection on solder side, my attention was caught by this particular:
Under a microscope:
A solder bridge was shorting two vias connected not only to pin 21 and 22 of the Z80 but also to two pins of the ‘TC0140SYT’ ASIC (the sound and interrupt controller)
I removed the bridge with my iron tip and sound was back.Job done
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