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xodaraP

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Hi everyone,
I received this today, Guardian Storm by Afega. This game was released in 1998 and unusually was released in both vertical and horizontal versions. To achieve the horizontal version the resolutions were simply swapped meaning the horizontal version has black bars on the sides and the text is squished in places. This board is an Australian region board and horizontal.

Here is a picture of the board, it's very clean apart from some scratching on some of the ROM labels, suggesting it was stored stacked in with other boards and since the ROMs on this are on a daughterboard they got scratched up by pins from another board. Nevertheless there is no track damage or scratches on the bottom of the board.

IMG_3263.JPG


The board was sold as faulty due to a graphics glitch. When I turned it on it had severe graphics glitching in the foreground and larger elements, but most of the text and the ship sprites seemed to be ok. The region screen was a complete mess. The sound was also very crackly suggesting it needs a recap or that there is a fault in the sound section.

IMG_3266.JPG
IMG_3265.JPG


Whenever I see a fault like this, and I see one of these

IMG_3267.JPG


That's where I head first. And sure enough, there are very obviously lifted pins. I reworked these with a soldering iron and while working on one side I noticed this.

IMG_3267-edit.JPG


A pin that had been moved off it's pad and even though it was still making contact, it was also bridged to the next pin over.

I carefully fixed this with a small pair of tweezers, continued to reflow all 4 sides of the custom, cleaned up the excess flux and fired it up. 100% fixed! Even the sound is working perfectly, but that may be because it had warmed up, it will still be getting a recap.

IMG_3269.JPG
IMG_3268.JPG
 
Champion! Is there a technical name for the flux you use? The one I was using apparently is not for circuit board, I bricked my G-Net trying to change the bios chip - I was using something sticky that is sold here as flux, pretty sure its the wrong one.
 
I have a pot of rosin flux and a no clean flux pen from ChemTools - in this case I used the pen :)

You want a rosin based or no clean flux. Under no circumstances do you want an acid based flux. That stuff is for welding pipes, not circuit board work.
 
Nice work. Good seeing you have a clean easy win with the repair mate.
 
An update to this, I dumped the ROMs as I suspected this was an undumped region variant and submitted it to the MAME dumping union.

The audio ROMs matched the other variants but the others did not match anything currently within MAME, these have since been submitted to the MAME dev team! Another variant preserved :D
 
An update to this, I dumped the ROMs as I suspected this was an undumped region variant and submitted it to the MAME dumping union.

The audio ROMs matched the other variants but the others did not match anything currently within MAME, these have since been submitted to the MAME dev team! Another variant preserved :D
Awesome that it's an Aussie version too :)
 
Good spot on that pin, guess that was caught by something protruding from the board placed on top of it
 
I'm actually having a lot of issues with SMDs causing problems at the moment. This one, @djsheep had a Zero Wing with a similar issue and a Strikers 1945 II I just fixed which had a SH2, custom and 2 graphics ROMs loose.
 
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