Crazy Kong

[paulcan69]

Sorry to jump onto another board like this but my Crazy Kong has been going a bit mad over the last few days, now it won't boot (I can up a screen later if ness)
But just pulled the roms and compared to mame and I have this: (see photo)
Do you think it's worth burning the 3 that are not 100%?
Thanks...

 

[paulcan69]

Here's the fault, not gone any further yet, I have found some 2732's and I'm blanking them as we speak, I will keep the originals in case and burn fresh!

paulcan692011-07-04 22:07:30

 

[paulcan69]

Not even got as far as Z80 check yet, when I press 1p start and jump some of the characters change around as I press things!

 

[paulcan69]

Well need to check the cab as I tried another board and that runs/boots but badly, I think either the psu was going down or it had dropped a bit low?

But Crazy Kong still doesn't boot as I tried it on the test rig indoors and still the same

I tried the 3 new roms and still the same.

Maybe low voltage running through it for a while may have killed my much loved CK!!

It has got a few of the dreaded Fujistsu 74 series chips on there I bet that's the problem!!! One of them has died due to low voltage? Or maybe over voltage need to check.

I'll get to this board later, Galaxian first....shame as a few people are coming over on Thurs, one of my mates loves playing CK/DK.

I need to test the psu and voltage level tomorrow, but CK has been running in that cab loads lately.

It was Mr Do! before that glad that's ok, don't know what's worse!!

Such is life.

Sorry for the blog style posting.

paulcan692011-07-04 23:20:33

 

[trm]

Hi dude,

Just a quickie - I'm not aware of any way that running at low voltage would kill the logic chips. They'd just not work properly until the voltage was restored to the proper levels.

Also, I don't think you need to focus on the Z80 too much yet - it's clearly working as you say the game is playing blind.

In more general stuff, I'd also suggest trying romident (mame -romident DUMP.BIN) as that will show you any game it matches, as opposed to romcmp where you must provide something for it to match against.

It could be you have a variant which is almost identical e.g. the Midway/Namco text from your Galaxians ROMs and romcmp will show a high percentage match but not 100% leading you to think you may have problems. If a mame -romident DUMP.BIN and a romcmp against your suspect romset still fails then indeed you may have bitrot. Apologies if you're already using romident and this is teaching you to suck eggs

Keep plugging away dude!

 

[paulcan69]

Hello mate, thanks for the reply.
I do use Winromident but I find the database waaaayyyyy out of date, even my CK roms I just tried after you suggested that aren't even in it??
Is there a up to date database file for this?
If not can I somehow merge a mame file into it to make/force it to see all roms?
But as you can see above romcmp did find my said board?
I'm sure I just to have a version which worked really well?
I'm gonna look into that now!

That cab was running a bit high so calmed down the voltage a bit, but CK is still ill.
Ok cool so you think CK is running, I will spend a bit of time investigating that one!
Ta bud
Paul
(I'll never stop all this...having too much fun!)

 

[paulcan69]

Never mind just found a slightly newer data file for it and it found CK, but two of the roms it said not found?

 

[andyman]

Are they the 99.xx% roms, if so just burn them and see

Andy.

 

[trm]

Hi. The romident feature is built into any standard MAME executable. Go to mamedev and download the latest version of mame, then extract the ZIP and find mame. exe. Stick this somewhere.

Then from the command prompt, cd to the folder containing the mame.exe you've just downloaded and use the

mame -romident DUMP.BIN

command line I mentioned above. This will tell you whether it knows the image file.

I assume the way this works is that mame.exe contains a hash of all the rom files known for that version of mame, so it hashes the dump and compares that value to its internal list to produce the game name. A side effect of this is that if a game is removed from mame for any reason then it will probably be unable to be romidented if you use a mame.exe version from when the game was expunged. I've not found this to be a significant problem so far though.

 

[guddler]

I assume the way this works is that mame.exe contains a hash of all the rom files known for that version of mame, so it hashes the dump and compares that value to its internal list to produce the game name. A side effect of this is that if a game is removed from mame for any reason then it will probably be unable to be romidented if you use a mame.exe version from when the game was expunged. I've not found this to be a significant problem so far though.

You assume correctly

 

[P-Man]

Your character ram (or something that decodes from it) is duff, start at the 2114's behind the roms.

Oh, and whats this about 'dreaded fujitsu chips'. No, running a pcb under-voltage will not kill it, it just wont work properly. You listen to too many fairy stories.

P-Man2011-07-08 13:18:40

 

[paulcan69]

Thanks p-man I shall check those 2 2114's I can see where you mean ta.

And yes I'm gonna stop listening the fairy stories and listen to facts!

 

[paulcan69]

Just to update, I removed the two 2114 rams, soldered in two nice new sockets, and placed two known good 2114 rams.

It still boots to garb, I didn't think it would magically fix it, but thought it would be good to have sockets there anyway, and 2114's seem to be a good place to start.

It does slightly change my garb screen when I plug it in.

Any advice on what to probe and where to try?

(and your reasons why so I can understand why you would probe there)

Please?

Many thanks,

Paul.
paulcan692011-07-10 00:45:51

 

[P-Man]

When i said start at the 2114 rams, i didn't mean replace them right away... if piggybacking those rams didn't clear up your problem then you would probe around what addresses them, and where the data goes off from there.

There are no schems for crazy kong (you have the single board right?) so unfortunately without getting a pcb out and going through it in parallel with you there's not much i can say other than you need to deduce this on your own following signals around the pcb, using the 2114 character rams as a starting point. You know you're at the right rams when you short the data lines together briefly and see the graphics change.