Double Dragon repair log #1

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Aug 012010
 

Got a broken DD board off Ebay. Original fault was the picture was white with black blocks.

The board had many repairs done in the past, some bad some good, so I started by removing them all and checking them through. One of them was a length of kynar replacing a lifted track but was going to the wrong place! fixed that but made no difference at all.
Some of the RAM had been socketed but had used badly cut down sockets, replaced these also.

After a long time inspecting the underneath of the boards and fixing a LOT of broken tracks I noticed a few chips on the CPU board had a lot of flux around the solder points but no sockets had been fitted here. They were all 74LS273 chips and one was a Fujitsu! Put the probe of the Fujitsu chip and most of the pins were dead. Desoldered to find a lot more broken tracks. Tested the old chip, it failed miserably. Put a socket in, pulled the schematics for the CPU board and repaired all the tracks that were broken. New chip inserted and fired it up, all back to normal.

Super Contra repair log #1

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Aug 012010
 

This baffled me for a long time but ended up being really simple.

When the player died and the Continue countdown came up, it would only count down to 7 then returned to the title screen. Logic suggests that this shouldnt be the case and checking in MAME proved it.
The problem ended up being button 1 for player 2 was stuck on.
Traced the stuck low signal through resistor array CRA3 and to a 74LS253 IC @ D19. Pulled and replaced the IC now all is happy.

Pitfall II repair log #1

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Jul 252010
 

I wired up the non jamma board I recently got, its a SEGA board marked up as Pitfall II but at some point the ROMs had been swapped out for Wonderboy ones. I already have a Wonderboy board and prefer them to be original so I burned a new set of Pitfall unencrypted roms and swapped them over.
I noticed the the game also had a fault where the left side of the screen was repeated on the right side. After a little tracing out I found a 74LS283 with a floating pin, I swapped this for a spare and fault fixed.
Not a fan of this game, will probably sell it.