SNESNESCUBE64

It's a tkg3, if I ever saw a tkg2 I would scoop it right up. There are actually instructions for converting radarscope boards to donkey kong floating out there, it doesn't take much. From what I understand, some red cabinets were being made at the factory alongside the blue ones, those would have most likely been tkg3 DKs.

I don't really work with electromechanical. Im not an expert nor do I care to be.

I do software during the week, during evenings and the weekend I repair arcade and pinball circuit boards.

It was almost a donkey kong. I have a bunch of stuff for that, and I had actually tracked down a 4 board stack DK and was in the process of making it DK, then I noticed the TRS and said "this is gonna cost me a lot of money..." This game has grown on me a lot. I spent a good chunk of time playing it, the game gets pretty hectic! I'll get a donkey kong one day, but I was convinced by orlandu81 on klov to do the right thing and make it Radar Scope. I suppose it's neat to have one of the few that wasn't converted to DK. Only thing I know about it is that it came from Minneapolis.

Switch is rated for 125V at 10 amps, it should be fine. Yeah I had to double check as I know these old transformers can be trouble. I'm not the worlds best at fixing monitors, a lot of my fixing in that regard is based off previous knowledge (caps are generally bad and nintendo potentiometers suck). But I'm getting better at troubleshooting the more I repair them. I have a bunch of em, I try my best to explain how I got to the conclusions. I really try to go into depth to try to teach folk about the electronics and logic when I can. As well as show the troubleshooting process.

So over the past month or two, I've been working on a neat cabinet, a Nintendo Radar Scope! I bought it a couple months ago locally, it was sold to me as a red Donkey Kong cabinet. The cabinet was already in excellent shape for being about 40 years old, but was missing most of its innards. The challenge with this was identifying whether or not it was Donkey Kong or Radar Scope, unfortunately it was missing everything but the transformer and the monitor, neither were really good identifiers. Looking more closely at the sticker on the monitor's frame, I could faintly see TRS U, identifying the cabinet as Radarscope. If it was Donkey Kong, it would have been TKG U. First step of the process was figuring out what worked here. Light fixture and the isolation transformer worked as it should. However, the monitor needed some help. It had sync problems. I just went ahead and recapped the whole monitor as that is always a good idea. After firing it up again, it still didn't have sync. It was the horizontal hold potentiometer ultimately (those nintendo pots are always crusty). Unfortunately I had to craft a new pot based to make what I had on hand work. But it worked great! After I got the monitor working, it was now time to get everything I needed. The hard part about Radar Scope is a lot of the parts are getting hard to obtain. I sourced a broken board on KLOV, you can read about that repair here. From there I was able to focus on the controls. I ordered everything I needed (including a new coin door since the one on there was not correct) from mikesarcade.com. The challenge here was that the joystick was not like a typical Donkey Kong joystick, no it was some weird one that is kind of hard to find. My solution was to route out grooves suitable for a Donkey Kong style two way joystick. This worked out a lot better than expected, it was also my first time using a router! Afterwords, it was time to source the artwork. I got the artwork from a company called arcadeartshop.com, a UK based company. They did an excellent job with the repro artwork. It was super close to how the originals were, so I couldn't ask for a better job. I can't recommend them enough. They even expedited my shipping, which was really cool of them. They were worth every penny that I spent. After all that was set up, it was time to clean up the wiring and route a power switch up to the front. Typically I don't like making modifications to the cabinet, especially if it involves drilling holes into the cabinet. However, it was only two small holes on top of the coin box shroud and I hate trying to reach behind the cabinet for the switch. No harness hackery was required, I simply made a little patch cable that plugged in between the power in and the isolation transformer. In the previous pictures, the coinbox and shroud were actually missing, but I was able to source them without an issue. After all that was said and done, it was looking super nice. It still could use some touch up work (including the long instruction sticker), but I am going to do that as I am able to. I want to thank orlandu81 on KLOV, he really guided me through this whole restoration. Without his help, I wouldn't have been able to finish this project. There is more that I did to this cabinet, like install a highscore save kit, but that's diving into the nitty-gritty of this. I wouldn't call this a restore, it still has a lot of its battle scars from being in service. But I am rather proud of what I've done to it.

So I completely forgot about this club, but I did some investigation into the audio issues that most of the monitors have, turns out they are bad capacitors! I wrote a whole log about them...

I don't even get that! The name for Intellivision was bought so they could capitalize on a name that the common folk don't know anymore. This whole thing is dumb.

Console has some solid titles including some of my favorites such as Yoshi's Story and Paper Mario.

I don't understand this console. The whole thing seems to be that you have centralized unit hooked up to a tv, and the controllers are like phones but for the whole family? It feels to me like they are trying to hit that demographic of kids who like phone games but don't have a mobile device of their own. Seems like an already really crowded market to be diving in, it seems that every kid these days has a tablet or phone and can download games for free. I wish them the best of luck with this one...

This Galaga board was a two part issue. Hooking up the board, the game booted to a white screen and zeroes. First step whenever you get some garbage like this is to check the signals on the CPU, make sure there are no stuck signals line reset, NMI, or other critical signals. Everything checked out fine, so the next step in this case is to check the ROMs. Verifying the ROMs on my programmer, I found that all were good except 3N, which wouldn't read anything back, completly dead. After programming a new ROM, the game fired right up! Everything worked fine except for the sounds, many of which just did not sound right. First thing I did in this instance was just shotgun replace the capacitors in the sound amp circuit. They were old and could benefit from being replaced anyway. Testing after the capacitors were replaced showed that there was no change, meaning the problem was somewhere else. Looking at the schematic (snippet shown below). It seems that much of the sound in question was generated by a Bipolar PROM whose data is fed into a buffer, through an analog and then sent to the LM324 preamp section. After all that it gets sent to the gameboard's main amplifier and then to the speaker. Partial Galaga sound generation circuit: Understanding the circuit a bit better, I decided the easiest place to start was with the PROM since I could just swap it with a known good one from my other Galaga boardset. Swapping the PROMs ended up fixing the issue, verifying that the PROM in question was indeed bad. This is rather unfortunate for me as it is a type of chip I currently cannot program, so I will have to source a new one. Just for reference, I made a little video showcasing the sound issue. Well, unfortunately the board is in a state in which it needs some PROMs. It has the bad PROM from the previous repair log that I did on a Galaga boardset. My programmers just are not capible of programming those old Bipolar ROMs, one day I will have one that can, but for now the board goes back on the shelf.

Probably in my office chair not paying attention.

The overlay is attached via an adhesive. If you take the console apart, you can just push the overlay out and apply a new one.

It's funny you mention the sounds. The reason why they sound so similar is because the soundboards (as well as a good chunk of Donkey Kong's hardware) was exactly the same minus a few minor changes. To show the comparison, the boardset on the left is an earlier 4 board Donkey Kong boardset and the right is a later revision Radarscope boardset. The similarities are wild. It makes sense though being that Donkey Kong was originally made to be retrofitted in these radarscope cabinets.

Nope, I don't have my first tv unfortunately. I remember it being a little baby 13 inch tv but I don't remember much about it. I do remember playing gamecube on it though which was super cool.

This was a repair I was super excited to do. For some background, right now I am in the process of restoring an original Nintendo Radarscope arcade cabinet. The cabinet is in super nice shape but was missing several things. Anyway, when I got it last night, I excitedly had to wait an hour for the boardset to warm up as it had been sitting outside in the fridged cold. When I first hooked it up, the game did not boot properly, only showing upside down 2s. The first thing I did to troubleshoot the board was check the sockets. On these earlier nintendo boards, they sometimes used these terrible Texas Instruments tension sockets. They wear out over time and weren't making good contact with the pins after 40 years of service. Before I replaced them, I pulled each chip, verified the rom to be good using ROMident (an online tool for comparing ROMs to what is in MAME). All ROMs verified good except the CPU ROMs which did not compare with anything online interestingly enough. With the ROMs checked, I sprayed some contact cleaner into the sockets just to see if I could get some more life out of the boards. The game did indeed start working. Problem was that there were graphics issues. First things first, you may have noticed that the image is slightly shifted to the left. On old Nintendo arcade boards such as Donkey Kong, Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Jr, and this one, Nintendo used two potentiometers on the game board to adjust position. These are always crusty or are broken and I always replace them with new Piher PT15s. Next step was to start replacing sockets. Since we saw inprovement when I reseated the ROMs on the video board, I decided to start replacing the sockets. Unfortunately, 4 sockets in I ran out. Fortunately though, replacing these sockets fixed the video troubles. Now I was ready to test it with audio. Fortunately most of the analog sounds were there, but I was missing digital and one of the analog sound effects. On the soundboard I noticed two things: there were some capacitors that had begun leaking and there was some weird Alkaline-like corrosion on the 556 timer. Both of these problems could effect the soundboard's ability to produce the missing sounds. I ended up putting a socket where the 556 timer was and put a new one in it's place. I also replaced the capacitors that were leaking and ordered capacitors for the rest of the board just to bulletproof it. After everything was said and done, the game was working and is super cool. I feel like Radarscope is a bit of an underated game, it has nice sound effects and the perspective is unique. It feels like a hybrid between Galaga and Juno First, both really fun games. I can't wait to get the cabinet finished so I can play it for real.

Theres nothing on that game board, but it is a legit game board. I sold that thing on nintendoage many moons ago for a fraction of what it was listed on ebay. It wasn't uncommon for dev boards to be socketed because board fab is expensive and it was cheaper to just reuse the one board.

I think I will pass for now. Although, I am super curious on what insight howard will be giving us.

I listened to this while working on an arcade board tonite.

So I rated it at a 4. Not because of the quality of the games or hardware. I think it has a fine library of games. However, the consoles themselves are a hassle. Either you are taking out a loan and are jumping through hoops to get an AES or you are jumping through more hoops to consolize an MVS which not everyone can do or should do. That or you gotta get and possibly restore a cabinet. That said. The accessibility of a many of these games is rather limited to those who either have the skills to rig stuff up or those who can afford the library. That said, there are a lot of fun games on the platform, however I don't really think its worth the hassle and set up to get things going. The AES in particular was ahead of its time, bringing the arcade experience in a way that hadn't previously been seen. Unfortunately, theres more to a console than just a library of games, you need the means to play the games.

This is actually a followup to a previous repair log I did on a previously repaired Donkey Kong boardset. Reason being is that last night I decided to run the game overnight to verify that the game will be reliable. Unfortunately when I ran the game this morning, the thumping sound that Donkey Kong was very high pitched, almost like a beep. When I power cycled the game, it was no longer a higher pitched tone, but rather a low distorted tone (closer to the actual thumping noise). First thing I did since it was distorted, was I probed around on the area in which a couple transistors mix in this audio. It was only two transistors and a few passive components, so it was quite easy to verify that everything there was working properly. One interesting thing I learned with this, is that if you short the base and emitter of the transistor Q2, it will actually trigger the thumping noise (in this case a very distorted one) to output on the speaker. With the mixing circuit verified, it was time to trace the issue back. The way DK generates the thump, is with a series of shift registers that are oscillating amongst themselves. From there the shift register feed into a xor (exclusive or) gate, making a clock that feeds into a counter, whose carry out is the waveform that makes the thump. Thump Noise Circuit Snippet The first logical step in this circuit is to verify 3J. 3J was giving an output, so potentially it was functioning fine. I went ahead and checked all the clock and all the outputs to verify it, everything looked good here, so the problem had to be farther upstream. This is where I began to question whether or not the clock signal was good. Probing the clock input, it seemed very odd that it was a perfectly consistent square wave. The way you make noise is by providing some sort of variations in the frequency in a square wave. So what I did was double check how it was supposed to be on another DK board. On the good one, the waveform was completely different, which confirmed that the clock input was incorrect. Bad Clock at 3J Good Clock at 3J With the clock being incorrect, it was now time to probe around further upstream. Being that the signal was generated by the xor gate a 3K, it was a good idea to probe the inputs. Checking the inputs, I noticed that one input at pin 12 was stuck low. That is a problem as this means that this side will never effect the xor gate. The next step was to set up the logic analyzer to verify 74LS164 serial-in-parallel-out shift registers. With it set up, I noticed that although the shift register at 4K was getting a clock signal that looked correct, it was getting no data as it was pegged low. This makes sense, if the data is constantly low, then it will always output low. So the attention shifted to 5K as the data for 4K was generated by the eighth bit in the register at 5K. Hooking up the logic analyzer, I could see that the shift register was doing its job properly up until bit 6, from there it screws up its own signal and does not shift it as it should, rather it seems it almost imitates the clock. Bad 5K Output With the issue identified, it was really easy to come to the conclusion that this part was causing the issue and needed to be replaced. With it replaced, I checked it again on the logic analyzer to see if it was indeed the problem. Being that it was now shifting correctly, I could verify that this issue had been fixed. Good 5K Output After verifying it good with the logic analyzer, I hooked back up the sound amplifier back up to my test harness, and the thump sound was back and sounded exactly as it should. Now all that's left is to run the game for a while to make sure the game runs well. Crazy what one bad chip can do to a circuit like this.

I'm not gonna read this whole thread, this whole thing is nonsense. The dead givaway that this thing is a bootleg (or whatever you wanna call it) is that this thing is all hand soldered and the soldering looks like shit. No NWC was hand soldered as far as I am aware, they were made using a process called wave soldering. If you want me to be frank, this is not a perfect copy, there are still minor nuances such as via locations. If someone has the money to spend on this stupid game, they should be able to do the homework required to understand whether or not it is fake. Bootlegs of this cartridge have been made for quite some time now, there is plenty of references available.

This is super neat. Glad this got found.

Sorry I missed game night, saturday was a particularly busy day and some unexpected things came up in the evening...

The box says 16 hours. It lasts both the workday and the evening typically for me.