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geldra

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I recently took a punt on eBay on a “none working” Raiden Fighters setup where the fault was described as “boots to a white screen”.

The actual game board is fine as it has been tested on a known working motherboard.

I received it this week and the motherboard looks immaculate except for in one place, there looks to be a small amount of corrosion on the large chip beneath where the rom board sits.

In terms of the behaviour of the setup, it may look like it only boots to a white screen but the game is very definitely running as you can hear it and it does display some graphics, albeit quite distortedly. (I’ll take some pics/a vid and attach later today). During the intro/attract you can see some cloud elements. If you coin up you can see the flames from the “press start” screen, and you can see elements of the player select screen. I can’t see any in game gfx though.

I guess my question is, would the damage in the photo be the cause of this type of fault and would it be fixable?

Cheers!
 

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That looks like flux residue, possibly from an attempt to reflow some of the pins on that custom IC. On the SPI motherboard it's fairly common for pins on the custom ICs to come loose. Try carefully cleaning the flux off with isopropyl alcohol.
 
Hey Phil, thanks for the reply. I’ll give that a go.

Coincidentally I came across your fix blog for your Raiden Fighters last night.

I’ll grab that vid of the board behaviour at some point today too.
 
Some pics, in sequence:

A white screen, attract clouds, title screen, press start, player select.

Honest. :D
 

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That looks like flux residue, possibly from an attempt to reflow some of the pins on that custom IC. On the SPI motherboard it's fairly common for pins on the custom ICs to come loose. Try carefully cleaning the flux off with isopropyl alcohol.
I appear to have gotten rid of the flux but the behaviour is the same unfortunately.

Hopefully you can see from the photos that the game is running. Flexing the board doesn’t change the behaviour at all, suggesting that it’s not an obviously loose component.
 
Aside from flexing, have you tried pressing down on individual chips on the board, while it is running, to see if anything visual presents itself?
 
That chip is under the ROM board so it's very hard to push down. Flexing won't help much as the connectors make it hard to bend the board there.
Reflowing the chip might help or replacing the SRAM (DRAM?) chips to rule out an issue with those.
I haven't had the time to analyse the SPI boards but I have one to fix. When (if…) I get round to it I'll try to share some notes.

TL;Dr reflow the chip, replace the RAM.
 
Thanks guys. Yes, I have pressed on the chips that aren’t obscured by the game board without any change.
 
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