SNESNESCUBE64

The beanbean kingdom and the mushroom kingdom are in the same world. Mario and Luigi get to it via bowser's battleship or whatever. Same with Princess peach who traveled there via plane. It would be like saying Isle Delfino is its own world when Mario and friends just travel there. Perhaps I am missing the point... Perhaps I am missing something, but what is Video Game Masters vs. The League of Darkness?

First time that I've ever worked on a Gyruss. I have to say, the fact that it had any custom ICs at all kind of intimidated me a little bit. I am not the best when it comes to video issues, but is something I am working on getting better. But anyway, this was a pretty straightforward repair. So the problem at hand was that there were no moving sprites at all. Text would appear, but nothing that moved. This is great because it really helps narrow down the circuit. After doing a bit of research online, I found out that there was actually a test rom, which ended up making the repair even easier. What was nice about this, is that it was only adding one additional ROM in an unpopulated socket at J14. After burning the ROM and populating it, it showed that RAM 17C, all the between 11A and 14A, and the ROM at 19E was bad. This is a bit suspicious, because that implies that nothing is working at all with the sprite engine, you would think something would be working. Looking at the schematic, all the data gets sent from the main Z80 CPU to a Konami 501 custom IC, then through a buffer to the 17C RAM and beyond. Here's the problem, I don't have an easy way to verify the 501 is working other than checking it's signals. Everything looked fine as far as I can tell with the outputs of that, so I shifted focus to buffer at 13E (a 74ls245). Looking at the signals on my oscilloscope, I could see that it was getting all the signals but a few of the outputs were stuck low. That was awfully suspicious as it really should be toggling. After socketing and replacing 13E, the moving sprites were all back! Great to know that it was the issue tying everything up. I've never played Gyruss before, it was really fun and I wouldn't mind owning one of these cabinets in the future.

I just stumbled across this thread, but this is probably why I have ear ringing lol.

Price drop. I can do trades for arcade related items!

Make sure you got 5V at the logic chips. If you don't, make sure power is getting in at all. That power plug is a failure point and can be prone to cold solder joints, make sure that it is solid and that the regulator is getting power. If it is and the regulator is functioning correctly, then start checking the ICs onboard. There are three of them, 6810 Bipolar RAM, the TIA chip, and the 6507 CPU. Last time I had a major chip failure, it was the TIA unfortunately, I verified by swapping with a known good atari. You can get the TIA from best electronics, but you are gonna pay a pretty penny. Unfortunately with 2600s, they aren't worth a whole lot so the really expensive ICs are kind of a turnoff.

Check your connections in the backbox, those connectors get dirty after a while, these data east games also are known to have power board problems. I know some of the fuse holders are paper thin and the holders should be replaced. Some of those connections also get super burnt due to bad connections and cold solder joints, I would make sure they are all in good shape. That might solve some of your "warm up" problems. I've also had to replace caps on a couple of those...

The conversion to LED is SOOOO worth it. If you color it out correctly, it really makes everything pop, plus the added benefit of not having to change bulbs. Congrats on the first machine, they are a lot of work but once you get everything taken care of, they are so much fun. Data east games are some of my favorites, I hope to have a Data East Jurassic Park one day.

This one is complete and comes with the key, demo game hardware, and even a couple demo discs. I repaired the monitor as it was having sound issues like most of these kiosks, so everything works on it. Even comes with a couple custom 3d printed mounts for amiibos that go on top, but does not come with the amiibos. I am planning on moving in the nearish future and would rather not take it with me but will if I have to. Asking $700 or (partial) trade for arcade related stuff. Looking for Donkey Kong Jr, Popeye, or even an empty Nintendo cabinet. Also looking for an original bubble memories F3 cartridge (Not a conversion). Would do straight trade for a Bosconian or battlezone cabainet. Cabinets don't have to work or be perfect, it would just effect the trade. These are local pickup in Metro Detroit, Michigan only, cash and carry. I will have it arranged to get this up my stairs and into the garage before pickup BEFORE you pick it up assuming you give a couple days notice, otherwise I will ask for help.

This was a quick fix as I've seen this issue before. So I was working on a Data East Laser war pinball machine, and some of the flashers were stuck on. This pinball machine just had all of its bulbs replaced with LEDs, so realistically there shouldn't have been a problem. There were also several stuck on so it was more than just a bad socket or a wiring issue. I identified the bulbs as the following: Flashers are driven by the solenoid circuits, so it seemed odd that the flashers were for solenoid drivers 6, 7, and 8. Looking at the schematic, I could see that the ones in question all had a warming resistor. What a warming resistor does is that it provides a current to a bulb that is less than what is necessary for it to glow. The idea is that it makes it a little bit quicker to warm up and flash than it would be from a cold start. This can be represented by the highlighted resistors below: LED bulbs do not need these warming resistors as they require not only a lower amount of current to flash but because they are LED they turn on much faster. Not even all the flashers have these warming resistors as I pointed out. The solution here was literally to just remove the 660 ohm resistors from circuit. After removing them, they turned off as they should and even flashed as they should.

How else can he be that cool?

Remember the thread where we talked about what we will do with our games after we are done collecting? My answer for this thread is the same as the other.

Counting all the assholes in the room, well I'm definitely not alone...

Bump, lowered prices a bit. Always happy to field some offers

Yet another Donkey Kong boardset that boots to garbage. This one was a bit more interesting as there were two main problems with this board. Whenever the game does not boot, I always check the ROMs and make sure that the game can read the ROMs if I can check that. The ROMs all checked out good using my programmer, so now it was time to check to see if the game board could read them. The way I check is by using a Fluke 9010a with a Z80 pod. What this does is it emulates the Z80 CPU and allows me to run troubleshooting, such as ROM and RAM checks. To check the ROMs on Donkey Kong, you are going to need to run checksums on the address range of 0000 to 3FFF. Attached are what the checksums should commonly return, a different rom set will return different values, but these are the most common for this type of board. After verifying all of the ROMs and that they could be read with no issue. The next check was to check the CPU RAM. There are six 2114 SRAMs (1kx4), resulting in three pairs of two. The way they work on Donkey Kong is that they are set up in pairs to form a full 8 bit bus since the 2114 only stores words that are 4 bits wide. They are separated into the upper and lower bits, the lower being D0 through D3 and the upper being D4 through D7. Often times when these fail, the data will be messed up for only one. While running through my RAM checks, I found that there were two RAM chips that had actually failed: 3C and 4B. After replacing these, it now passed all of the RAM tests, but it still wasn't booting. It looked like it was actually resetting while trying to display part of the title screen. What was weird about it was this is that nothing looked out of place with any of the control signals, so I ended up doing some research and found that the TKG4-14 has a watchdog circuit (I believe that's what it is). One way to disable this for testing is to cut the jumper CR3. To my surprise after cutting the jumper, the game booted up! After probing around, I found that pin 5 was actually floating. It ended up being a problem with C164, that cap had tested open, the watchdog was always activating. After replacing it, the CPU board worked exactly as it should. One new capacitor and two new RAMs and this game is now back in working order, on to the next DK!

Bump, added a buncha stuff. I will be adding more later.

Yet another space invaders boardset on the bench, this time it isn't a deluxe boardset. After hooking it up it would boot to only showing one invader, not making it any further than that. First thing I do in a case like this is double check the ROM strapping so I can hook up the test ROM. This one was configured for 9316B mask ROMs, so I was able to just drop my test ROM in with no issue. From there, the test ROM told me the the exact issue, it was RAM C. Before I flat out replaced it, I swapped C and D to see if the problem moved to D, which it did. This indicated that the 2107 RAM that was now located at D was the issue. Replacing the RAM fixed the issue and the game now boots up with no issues.

I'm down to join again this year

Gonna bump this. I forgot I had these for sale.

On the bench today was a Space Invaders Deluxe that I had grabbed off the pile. This one had unfortunately been a parts unit, as someone had taken several parts off the board, probably to fix another Space Invaders board. It was also pretty dirty, so I had to give it a bath. After washing the board, my first thing was to attend to the missing parts. It was missing a 9316 (Really a 74161 counter), a 74ls04, and an Intel 3245. The intel 3245 has become a bit more difficult to get a hold of as it was discontinued quite some time ago. So this was actually an opportunity to try to use a Soviet equivalent, which could be obtained for much cheaper because there is more NOS of that left behind. For this I used the K170AP4. Another part that I noticed was missing was the 180pF tuning capacitor that was used to help the crystal oscillate. Unfortunately, I did not have that particular value available. I did however, have a bunch of 56pF capacitors. You can add capacitance by putting capacitors in parallel, so I solder three of them to leads and soldered them onto the board to get 168pF, which is probably close enough. After replacing all the missing parts, I found that the game had a dead short on the 12V rail, which is obviously no good. One way to kind of narrow down a short like this is to utilize your multimeter if it is sensitive enough. The closer you get to the short, the lower the resistance will be. First place I checked was the tantalum capacitors, as those have a tendency to short out. It ended up being one of the tantalums by the RAM (shown below). I removed it and replaced it with an electrolytic that I had since I don't stock tantalums. After the power situation was taken care of, I hooked it up to find that it booted to garbage. First thing I did was reseat the ROMs and the CPU as midway loved to use bad single wipe sockets. After reseating the chips, the game fired right up and worked as it was supposed to, another board back from the dead! It's always a shame to see people use these things for parts. Sometimes it's difficult, especially with custom chips and whatnot.

Last repair from today's pile of Centipede boards. This one kept on resetting when it loaded the initial mushrooms. One thing I noticed is that all the legs on the ROMs were corroded, so first thing I did was clean them using TarnX as the legs were made from silver. Just as a note, the easiest way to tell whether or not the legs are silver are if they turned black from corrosion. Normal EPROM legs will not do this. Even after cleaning the legs, the game still would not boot, so the next step was to verify the ROM's contents. The way I do this is by using the ROM identification tool at arcaderestoration.com. The way this works is you upload the dumped ROM files and it compares them against what is found in MAME calculating the checksum. It should match up to something assuming the ROM is in MAME. All the ROMs matched a counterpart in MAME except for the one at F/H1. From there it was as simple as writing a new ROM. After writing the new ROM, the game booted up just fine! Solution: Replace F/H1

This isn't going to be as much of a log, but I had a centipede on the bench with really quiet and distorted sound, it ended up just being a bad LM324 preamp at K10. The way I troubleshooted this one was literally by stacking a known good one right on top of the bad one. I did a little video to showcase exactly what I am talking about: Edit: just to emphasize how common of a failure this is, I worked on 8 centipede boards today, 3 out of the 8 had a bad/failing LM324. It's good to have a large quantity of these things lying around if you repair boards...

This was probably one of the quickest repairs I've ever had. I got a pile of Atari Centipede boards I needed to test and get up and running, what's nice about that is that I can swap things around quickly. First board I looked at had corrupted graphics. The game was running just fine, but the sprites were all wrong. Some were fully corrupted and most were completely wrong. So with centipede, it has two 2516/2716 equivalent ROMs for storing the sprite data. They are located at F7 and H/J7. I noticed that one of the ROMs was physically damaged, so I changed that one first and saw improvement. Sprites were no longer glitchy but were wrong. Replacing the second had fixed the rest of the graphics troubles. Sometimes it really is that easy, ROMs are not difficult or expensive to replace, so easy and cheap fix. This repair only took about 5 minutes from first seeing it with corrupted graphics to seeing it working perfectly.

^ I'm wonndering if this thing needs the rest of it to work. Will that cart not work on a regular super nintendo?

I love the energy you gave him. It's very wonderful!

Both are curved tubes with composite input, does not have component and is nothing special. Hence the free television sets. I was going to use them as arcade tube donors but one I can't use and the other I is for a chassis I typically don't have.