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Mortal Kombat 1 - DOA

98pacecar

98pacecar

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I had picked up a dead MK1 board a long time ago, with the intention of parting it out. It gave me a blank screen and showed no signs of activity, but it did have the Kombo board add-on so it was worth grabbing.

IMG_3159_small.jpg

I got bored over the weekend and started to look a bit more closely. Noticed the PLCC socket for the graphics processor was corroded pretty badly, so I pulled the chip, gave it a quick cleaning, and put it back in. That got me to the test screen, but most of the text was messed up and it stopped there. I pulled and reseated the processor again and finally got a boot to the game.

But, most of the text was nothing but garbage. I was working through a reseat of the roms when I noticed that one leg on the 114 rom was rusted through and broken off in the socket. Pulled the socket, reburned the rom, and tried to boot again.

IMG_3161.jpg

No luck, garbage on the screen and locked up at the self test. So I did the nasty and pulled the PLCC socket and replaced with a new one. Fired it up and success!

IMG_3160.jpg

I still need to clean up the board, replace the battery holder, and may replace a few of the logic chips as there is some corrosion on the board, but it's working and playing great!
 
Last edited:
Oops, misspoke in my post. I replaced the PLCC socket, not the actual chip. I found a few online, but at ~$50 a pop I didn't want to buy them. Got lucky that my chip worked, just needed a clean socket.
 
Well done! Love a happy ending.
 
what does that moded rom do??
i saw it added to mame - protection is a joke, but nothing about what it actually does afaik
 
Speeds it up, makes it possible to juggle more, sub zero’s freeze makes the opponent levitate, reptile comes out more often. Stuff like that. It’s a cool bit of history, but not really all that great. Just hard to find since it needs a daughter board to run.
 
you could patch the protection and just burn a rom.
though i would keep games like that original.
 
I always wondered about that possibility. The daughter board has a GAL and a crystal on it, so I assumed it was more than just protection. Admittedly, that's way out of my area of expertise so I'm likely wrong.
 
from mame:

/* the security GAL overlays a counter of some sort at 0xfffff400 in ROM space.
* A startup protection check expects to read back two different values in succession */
 
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