ShootTheCore
Legendary
Some folks have expressed interest in seeing a short writeup on the arcade repairs and console repairs / mods that I do in my spare time, so I'll post a little Repair Diary here when I do one.
Some quick notes:
1) I don't do this kind of work for hire - only for myself and one or two friends.
2) I'm all self-taught based off of what I learn from blogs, forums, YouTube videos, and the advice of some friends that do electronics rework professionally.
3) I'm leaving out details of the HOURS of continuity testing, logic testing, Googling, forum posts, etc that it takes to diagnose these boards.
OK, with that said, here's Repair Diary #1. I purchased this Forgotten Worlds conversion board with a background problem - the character sprites would appear, but the background would only display scrolling vertical lines.
The culprit was the PAL chip at location 1A on the secondary B Board - this chip "engages" the background ROM chips. It was burning hot to the touch after the board had been left on for a moment, so it was the obvious culprit. I replaced the chip with a programmable GAL chip using the data from the equivalent MAME ROM set, and all was well.
Some quick notes:
1) I don't do this kind of work for hire - only for myself and one or two friends.
2) I'm all self-taught based off of what I learn from blogs, forums, YouTube videos, and the advice of some friends that do electronics rework professionally.
3) I'm leaving out details of the HOURS of continuity testing, logic testing, Googling, forum posts, etc that it takes to diagnose these boards.
OK, with that said, here's Repair Diary #1. I purchased this Forgotten Worlds conversion board with a background problem - the character sprites would appear, but the background would only display scrolling vertical lines.
The culprit was the PAL chip at location 1A on the secondary B Board - this chip "engages" the background ROM chips. It was burning hot to the touch after the board had been left on for a moment, so it was the obvious culprit. I replaced the chip with a programmable GAL chip using the data from the equivalent MAME ROM set, and all was well.