68000 Cave Boardset question

[CoolMod]

So I bought a pretty cheap DDP board set, however the owner said one or more of the graphics fpgas might be bad. IE these:



I see most of the other Cave board sets have the same looking chips, but are they truly the same? IE, can I pick up a broken pcb with one on it and transplant it into the ddp one? Thanks!

[BubbaMc]

I think you could, but you would need to reprogram it unless it's the same chip from the same game.

[moh]

they are also the centipedes of ICs .________.

[trap15]

Those are not FPGAs, they are ASICs. 3 of them should be the same (the background tilemap generators, should be the smaller ones) and the unique one should be the sprite generator. Enjoy soldering a ~160 pin QFP though. All of those Banpresto boards have them, so you should be able to replace it with a cheapish one's ASICs.

[CoolMod]

So as long as it's not the bigger one, I should be alright to replace them?

[trap15]

The bigger one can be replaced with any of the same ones (each of the ASICs has writing on them that has the part name; same part name means it should be ok to replace with), and the small ones are the same way.

[CoolMod]

I see, I see. Do you know off the top of your head which boards have the same chips that can replace the smaller ones and the bigger one?

[trap15]

There's a lot. I guess check the cave.c driver in MAME for a list, though I wish they'd rename the driver since the board isn't CAVEs...

[CoolMod]

I actually did check cave.c and DDP's line is blank lol

[trap15]

It's actually not The longer numbers on that are the date code, which doesn't really matter much since different PCBs will have different date codes on their ASICs most likely. It's the "038" and "013" bits that are the part number, which you can see are used by all the other games on that Banpresto hardware.

[CoolMod]

Oh, so you meant the 013 and 038...sweet....most of em use that, that's awesome. Appreciate it!

[Opethian]

is that PCB on vacation? out side in the sun lol

[BubbaMc]

How do you plan on soldering these IC's? What gear do you have?

[trap15]

I was wondering the same thing, honestly. Soldering a QFP isn't something any chump with a soldering iron can do.

[CoolMod]

Oh, I won't be doing it myself..I'm taking it to a guy near me that has a huge arcade pcb repair thing going. He even has a $70,000 reballing station heh. I was just wondering if worst comes to worse, if I was able to get the chips off another board.

[Dave_K.]

Oh, so this is Ken Westerfield? Since he is local, I'd be interested in knowing more about his costs, as I have a couple reflow projects.

[CoolMod]

Yeah it's Ken. I'll letcha know how it goes. I've gone over there many times with just "questions" and he is happy to help.

[CoolMod]

Okay, so I just came back from Ken's house. He looked under a microscope at the chips and said that basically traces were gone, chips had missing pins, bridges etc. So I asked him if I brought in a donor board for those chips, would he be able to fix everything? He said no problem but it would be around $150. I told him "Sounds good". He had this puzzled look on his face and I told him how much a DDP board is worth and he had this "WTF" look on his face. So yeah, getting a donor board for the chips and hopefully everything should be good.