Flinnster
Enthusiast
Recently I picked up a few boards from someone local leaving the hobby.
One of these was a Sega Shinobi, dead and unloved - they commented on how the adaptor was the only thing of value....
(not to me buddy, not to me!
)
The pcb seems to have had an interesting life - while the first pcb numbers indicate it was a 'Time Scanner', it then has the factory labels for
'Shinobi'.. however carefully tidying up the labels a bit reveals another sticker underneath ending '...ONE' - so at some point, this was
also a 'Fantasy Zone'.
Powering up it was dead, but the board was getting power - so my attention immediately was the Hitachi FD1094 block.
The top came off easily (it had likely been prodded in the past) and within the battery was clearly dead and leaking.
The battery was actually dated May 1987.
So that was removed and I got to work cleaning up the pcb (it stank of the usual damp/mouldy storage) and checking the Roms, connectors etc.. all
seemed to be pretty good. I reflowed the solder on a few wobbly smoothing cabs, and found a single trace cut and patch wire, I guess due
to the factory conversion.
Booting the board after cleaning and with no CPU present, I was happy to get some video output with garbled characters, and a watchdog
tick-tick-tick-tick on the audio:
This matched very closely with what I'd read on some desuicide logs previously, so off I went and burnt 4x new code ROMs with the unprotected version,
and ordered up a fresh MC68000 CPU. Once that arrived, I popped it in.. powered up, and fingers crossed...
Waheeey! Really suprised to find no sprite or audio errors on this one - I definitely got lucky with this pickup!
(I was more than expecting there to be RAM issues or whatever)
Very happy to save another from someones trash pile, anyway
One of these was a Sega Shinobi, dead and unloved - they commented on how the adaptor was the only thing of value....
(not to me buddy, not to me!
The pcb seems to have had an interesting life - while the first pcb numbers indicate it was a 'Time Scanner', it then has the factory labels for
'Shinobi'.. however carefully tidying up the labels a bit reveals another sticker underneath ending '...ONE' - so at some point, this was
also a 'Fantasy Zone'.
Powering up it was dead, but the board was getting power - so my attention immediately was the Hitachi FD1094 block.
The top came off easily (it had likely been prodded in the past) and within the battery was clearly dead and leaking.
The battery was actually dated May 1987.
So that was removed and I got to work cleaning up the pcb (it stank of the usual damp/mouldy storage) and checking the Roms, connectors etc.. all
seemed to be pretty good. I reflowed the solder on a few wobbly smoothing cabs, and found a single trace cut and patch wire, I guess due
to the factory conversion.
Booting the board after cleaning and with no CPU present, I was happy to get some video output with garbled characters, and a watchdog
tick-tick-tick-tick on the audio:
This matched very closely with what I'd read on some desuicide logs previously, so off I went and burnt 4x new code ROMs with the unprotected version,
and ordered up a fresh MC68000 CPU. Once that arrived, I popped it in.. powered up, and fingers crossed...
Waheeey! Really suprised to find no sprite or audio errors on this one - I definitely got lucky with this pickup!
(I was more than expecting there to be RAM issues or whatever)
Very happy to save another from someones trash pile, anyway
