shmups.system11.org

Ah, thanks. Some translations are... erm... funny. And it messes up my css based design.

I literally went O_O when I read this from your site (Midway games thread, page 1):

"Fixed: NBA Jam
Symptom: Scratchpad RAM Error

Board would power up with a Scratchpad RAM Error for UJ7. Replaced the bad chip, a 44256 DRAM, with a socketed replacement. Board would then power up and run but would intermittantly give an error on Video RAM UA11.

Replaced the VRAM IC at UA11 - part # MT42C8128, a 256 x 8 SAM + 128K x 8 RAM dual port video RAM chip. Chip is hard to find but can be found on some old Sun Microsystems frame buffer (video) cards from the early 90s. (In this case a Weitek Power 9000 based card by Megatek)
Ran board through the built-in burn-in tests and played a couple of games."

This is some incredible know-how!

fwiw, there's a ton of those on eBay, refurbished, at the moment. also, this company seems poised to fulfill orders..? Could just be an overly-optimistic ordering system though.

My repair logs have moved homes!

The NewLifeGames.net server was old and had some under the hood issues that couldn't be overcome. A new server was launched and is now at NewLifeGames.com and the old site is being left up as a reference until it eventually dies. All my repair logs have been migrated over to the new site and I edited my post in this thread with the new address.

Thanks!

Raymond

Thnx for letting us know, m8. I'll update the reference on my blog ASAP as well };-P

Here's a fun one. Been going through a backlog of dead CPS2 stuff and found a 19XX which had some battery acid damage. Not nearly as bad as I'd seen before, but enough to have eaten a processor pin clean off. I had to dig into the chip body to find something to solder to:



The pin is actually a Vcc pin, which is connected inside the chip to the other Vcc pins, but it's not good to rely on that because you really don't know how much current is required in each the portion of the chip. Power restored
-ud

Nice! Had to do something similar to that with a Japanese Saturn I had.

http://i.imgur.com/4YNnWeX.jpg

Thanks! These are nice to read and look at!

A couple years ago I had an N64 with a CPU pin eaten clean off but it still seemed to function perfectly. I checked the pinout on a working console and, sure enough, it happened to be one of numerous redundant pins to ground. Lucked out! No such luck with this one though...
https://imgur.com/a/VXFbWsn

This was a Mexican N64 with an “NS9...” serial number that I bought for parts. Had a big sticker on it that said “Doesn’t Read.” Well, after my little patch, it does. Unlike the system with the missing pin, the corrosion was very hard to spot. Just looked like a darker pin on a board that actually looked pretty clean.

More/higher-res pics in the photo album linked above.

Doh! Yesterday I had every single IC taken off an SHVC-CPU-01 SNES / SFC board but I forgot to take hi-res shots for future troubleshooting before I put them all back on.


Oh well. Still figured it was worth sharing along with some under-chip PCB shots of Neo Geo AES 3-5, AES 3-6, and Turbo Duo / PC Engine Duo boards:
https://imgur.com/a/R5Et82O

Low-res sample:

Having these earlier definitely would have aided my troubleshooting. Save if you ever expect to work on these consoles!