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About this blog

This is just a blog for me to store my repair logs. I think it would be useful to others here if I post them as I am doing more repairs on arcade PCBs.

Entries in this blog

Arcade Repair

G07 Monitor - Kicked Neck++

This has been a project I've had for a while. Basically, I had aquired a g07 arcade monitor had it's necked, killing the tube. Being the nature of it, I really wanted to bring this thing back to life. For reference, I've had this project since the end of october, and I just now finally finished it, shows how behind I am... So the first step here, find a donor CRT. Compatible 19" tubes are starting to get harder to find. Fortunately, I had a broken tv set with a tube that had high life
Arcade Repair

Donkey Kong Jr. - no boot

This was a quick one that I did. I recently got another DK Jr boardset as part of a trade for a working one. To make the long story short, the game wasn't running.  The first step whenever you get a game that isn't booting is to check all the control signals such as reset, clock, NMI, Interupt, ect. If any of these are not functioning properly, then you are going to have issues with the game not booting.  So I checked all the control signals, everything checked out perfectly, ever
Arcade Repair

Galaga - sprite color issues

Here's a quick one. I wasn't going to do any repairs tonite, but I was pretty bored so I figured I'd start testing a pile of arcade boards. On the bench is a galaga. After cleaning the chip legs of the customs (they are always corroded), I fired up the game. To my suprise it booted up just fine!  The problem was that some sprite colors were off, specifically any of them that move such as the ship and the bugs.  Thinking about the issue, it dawned upon me that the sprites ar
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Arcade Repair

G07 Monitor - no picture

Here was a quick repair I did last night. It was on a G07 arcade monitor that came out of a centipede cabinet. When tested on the bench, I got no picture whatsoever. Looking closely, I heard no high voltage and saw no neck glow. What's nice about the G07, is that it is one of the easiest monitors to work on, it is as simple as unplugging thing the yoke, degauss coil, and anode cup, then remove two screws. Afterwords the chassis will slide right out! This monitor was in pretty good shape, it seem
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Arcade Repair

Donkey Kong - No Boot

So I had gotten some semi-repaired boardsets off KLOV last week. I've been wanting to get another Donkey Kong boardset for a while since I plan on getting a cabinet soon. Both boardsets did not work, both having different errors. When hooked up, it booted to nothing. First thing I noticed was that a bunch of chips had been socketed. None of the sockets were in good shape (one was an old nasty machine pin socket, another was a damaged dual wipe, and there were two terrible single wipe sockets), s
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Equipment Repair

Fluke 9010a - display problems

So for a long time I have been saving up for a Fluke 9010a, an in-circuit debugger for systems that utilize microprocessors such as the 6502, z80, and many others. It is a popular peice of test equipment for folk who do repairs on vintage arcade boards as it is super useful for debugging hardware problems. So I had finally won one in an auction, only problem is that it was having display problems. problem was that segments were stuck on, which tells me the display tube was good.
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Arcade Repair

Happ SE-M21C - Horizontal Jitters

So this was a quick one. I got a monitor about a month ago as just a tube and chassis, as the original owner wanted to keep the frame. I assembled a new frame out of the sides of what I believe was the sides of a WG19K4900 and the base of a G07.  After it was all assembled again, I jst needed to test it. Looking at the screen, it was obvious that it had a case of the jitters. I also realized I plugged the yoke in the flipped image plug.  After looking closly at it, I noticed that
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Equipment Repair

B&K 467 CRT Tester/Restorer

This is a bit different than what I normally do, in fact this is the first peice of equipment that uses a vacuum tube in it that I have acually worked on. So for those unfamiliar with the B&K 467, it is a peice lf test equipment meant for analyzing the health of CRT-based displays and if necessary, attempt to "rejuvenate" the tube in order to squeeze a bit more life out of it. It is particularly useful in the arcade world as many of those cabinets still have a well-used CRT in them. It is ca
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Arcade Repair

Pac Gal (Pacman Board Hack) - Video Mess

Here was a quick repair that I did this morning. About a year and a half ago I bought a pacman board that had been hacked to run a version of Ms.Pacaman without the auxiliary board. This was done by adding two extra ROMs and modifying the code a bit. As well as running the additional lines for different enables and cutting a trace so it could address the two extra ROM chips as shown in the bottom two pictures. So I hooked it up for the first time the other day, and saw that there were graph
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Arcade Repair

Popeye - Bad CPU

This one was probably one of the quickest fixes I've done. I ordered a Nintendo Popeye board as I saw it rather cheap. I got it, hooked it up, and got no boot. First thing I do in games that don't boot like this is reseat all the chips and swap the CPU (if I can easily do that) with a known good one. In this case, I only reseated the ROM chips on the CPU board and replaced the Z80 with one of my new old stock ones I bought recently. After doing such, it booted right up! Tur
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Missile Command - Graphics Troubles

This was a fun one as it was very interesting problem. The game itself worked suprisingly. However, there were issues with the graphics.  To me, this looks like an addressing error, as the game is fine but the graphics aren't quite there. I figured that it was a problem in the decoding. As shown in the schematic snippet below, this 7442 helps control which ROM bank, RAM, POKEY sound chip, or the user inputs like the trackball. Ultimately the bad chip ended up being this 744
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Donkey Kong Jr - Mostly graphics problems

So this was a boardset that I got from 8_bit_guerrilla as he no longer needed it. When he bought it, he got it from a seller saying that it had minor sprite issues. I think the seller lied a bit, because it was a bit more than minor. Essentially, the positions of sprites were all goofed up. On top of that, the original braze kit (an old one mind you) also no longer worked. The first step I followed was finished converting it back to stock, which was a simple as removing the leftover bodge w
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Kiosk Repair

Wii U kiosk Monitor - Audio Issues

This is something a bit different that I did a couple months ago. I'll start off by saying the Wii U Kiosk owner should consider doing this fix to their monitor. It is cheap and easy to do if you have any experience with a soldering iron. The monitor is fairly easy to pull out and dissassemble. As an overview, there are three boards, a logic board, a power supply, and a backlight board. I theorized that it was just cheap capacitors as I still heard a buzz coming out of the speakers. B
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Neo Geo MVS-1B -Video RAM error

On the bench today was a neo-geo sent to me by GameN' Clyde with video RAM issue as shown below. Symptoms - no boot, Video RAM Error Solution -two pins on the Neo-GC2 chip were shorted together, fixed as shown below. I'm really looking forward to playing some neo geo games, I can't wait to finsh building a harness for it and picking up some games.
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Bubble Bobble - Lots of Issues

This was an old repair that I did a while back, there was a lot wrong with it, surprisingly all CPU board issues... Symptoms: -5V rail was shorting to ground Solution: The bypass cap connected to the -5V rail had shorted, needed to be replaced. One thing to note is that several capacitors on this bubble bobble boardset had started leaking, so I ended up replacing all the capacitors with new ones. Symptoms: Not booting Solution: The game was stuck in a reset loop, it ended up
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Donkey Kong #2 - really quiet sounds

Symptoms - VERY QUIET audio, was barely audible with my audio amp all the way up Solution - There was a single burnt resistor, R13, which was just a 1k ohm resistor. After replacing that and the damaged capacitor that was next to it. The resistor is connected to the 5V rail, so based on the fact that it burned up makes me question whether or not the power rails were swapped around on accident. I got half a hacked harness in the box, so that further supports this theory.  Anyway,
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Sanyo 20EZ Chasis - Burning up R471

Symptoms: 20EZ losing high voltage and is burning up the resistor R471 and was blowing the 300mA fuse. Solution: replaced the burnt resistor, checked the HOT to make sure that was still good. HOT tested bad, so replaced with a NTE89. Fired it back up again, same results. Afterwords I swapped the flyback as that can cause the same issues (and I had one off a working chassis on hand), this solved the issue. Chassis is now working just fine and is ready to roll again.
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Donkey Kong - garbage on screen

Game - Donkey Kong Symptoms - Garbage on screen. It boots to the highscore table, but full of junk. From there it moves to the attract mode but mario falls below where he's supposed to be, game resets, and repeats this process. (Ignore the inverted color in the first picture, I didn't have an inverter board on hand). Solution - The board was originally missing stuff and had previous work (it was an 'untested' special on ebay). The previous work looked fine so I could start. I figured t
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