1944: The Loop Masters repair log

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Nov 092010
 

Bought 2 boards off ebay the other day, one was Super Street Fighter 2 The New Challengers and the other was this 1944 The Loop Masters.
Both were sold as being faulty.
When I fired this up it gave a solid blue screen.

This is a classic sign that the board has suicided so to make sure I opened it up and inserted my CPS2 test eprom (available from CPS2SHOCK site) into ROM slot number 3.
It loaded up confirming that the board had suicided.
The strange thing was that the battery was still giving out 3.6v but as this was one of two board with the same indicated fault I assume the previous owner had done something silly.
Only the EPROM in slot 3 requires replacing to phoenix this game so with that done and the battery removed I fired it up again.


I would have liked to keep it original but there is nothing I can do about that now.

Dragonball Z 2 Super Battle repair log

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Oct 282010
 

Had this board for nearly a year now but the game is so bad I’ve never bothered repairing it until now.
The board itself is pretty clean but the sprites had jailbars through them.

This is quite often a sign of dodgy ROM’s. Several of the MASKROM’s were socketed so I dumped them and checked them against MAME, they all checked out fine. The MASKROM’s are read as 27C160 EPROM’s.
After a little bit of probing, prodding and pulling I believed the fault to be down to the MASKROM at the top right of the board. After inspecting the board under the magnifier I located about a dozen cracked/dry joints. Went over all the solder points on the sockets with the soldering iron, replaced the ROM’s and fired it up. All the graphics were fine and no amount of board flexing could bring the fault back.

Lethal Enforcers ‘Justifier’ gun repair log

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Oct 162010
 

The Lethal Enforcers guns arrived today.
On testing I found that the RED gun aiming was off a little to the right and the BLUE gun didn’t register a shot on screen but it did register when the trigger was pressed.
I fixed the RED gun simply by removing and cleaning the lens.
When I opened the blue gun a few bits dropped out, the photo transistor and the spring that pushes the trigger back out.
The photo transistor had simply been dislodged.


I cleaned up the solder holes and resoldered the part back onto the small PCB.


I decided to give this lens a clean too as it had a big greasy fingerprint right on the middle of it.
The hardest part of this repair was getting the bloody spring back in place and to keep it there for long enought to put the gun back together. After a lot of bad noise I managed it. Ive taken a couple of pictures just in case anyone else needs to know how the spring actually goes back in.


I retested the guns and the RED one works perfectly but the BLUE one doesn’t register shots fired around the edges. This is usually a common problem with older monitors as their brightness fades over time and the guns fail to register the screen flash. I know this shouldn’t be a problem with mine but I also know that components degrade over time too. I removed the bezel glass from my cab as it is slightly tinted and the BLUE gun now works perfectly. I will probably order a new photo transistor at some point, or possibly a new glass bezel!

Lethal Enforcers repair log #1

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Oct 132010
 

I decided to take a look at the Lethal Enforcers board I recently bought as it had no sound.
There are many accounts of people with this problem on the forums for this board and the X-Men board, they use the same IC.
I found an excellent post over on the KLOV forums here and decided to see what I could do.
I scraped away the resin around the capacitors and with my multimeter checked continuity following the diagram user tkrn had posted in the above thread.


Capacitor C6 had leaked a little and had corroded the track between the positive side and the first pin of the 3 pin IC next to it. I removed the capacitor with a set on small pliers, it came off very easily, and replaced it plus I bridged the corroded track too.


Fired the board up and full sound is back. I haven’t replaced any of the other capacitors yet as its working but when I take this board out and store it I will probably do so just for the sake of longevity.

Many thanks to tkrn over at the KLOV forums for his excellent post, without it I wouldn’t have attempted this fix.

Bubble Bobble repair log #2

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Oct 032010
 

Symptom: No RGB output
Cure: Traced the Red signal back to pin 6 on an LS32 (IC57) on video board, it was dead. socketed and replaced the IC and everything is back

Note: This was a (Super) Bobble Bobble bootleg board but I think the majority of the layout etc is the same

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