Exerizer

[grobda]

A princely sum of £6 (& £7 postage) and a hankering to get back into fixing PCBs got me buying a Exerizer PCB offof fleabay.

described thus;

'Not fully working. The game plays but graphics are faulty and there is no sound.'

Plugged it in, twiddled the volume pot and behold, sound appears.




Right enough it had a graphics issue. Looked garbled but was actually incorrect colours.




Reseated the ribbon cables that connected the two PCBs.




Fixed!




Too easy tbh

I wanted something to get my brain working again.

grobda2014-09-10 18:43:22

 

[Big Phil]

I have about 40 boards if you really want tasked

 

[grobda]

well... spoke too soon. Turns out on playing on mame showed it had a starfield, which mine was missing.

mame driver mentioned rom 10 was background. eprom checked ok but game ran the same wether it was there or not. looking around spotted 2 6148 rams at 3a and 3b. scoping the outputs showed the signal was only marginally deflected from being a constant high. following the tracks showed they are tied to a resistor array at 1k that was pulling them uo to 5v.

Idecided they were failing and lacking the capacity to pull the signal low. not 100% sure but lacking schematics I decided to pull them and swap them. hadnt come across 6148s before but googled the datasheet and found they were the same as a 2114s and 2148s... then after i removed them found '2148 or 6148' screened under the chips anyway.

so. installed 2 2148s I had and got a starfield. but not the same as in mame; multicoloured rather than greyscale, and 'twinkly' it also produces a parallax depth effect periodically rather than the blobby gray animation that mame shows.

i think it looks better... suits the foreground sprites which are also colourful.

anyone else got an exerizer? i found a video where it looks like the pcb is being played and the background is sparkly (bad video though);

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BTuniuaURkc

compared to mame (sky fox but exerizer does same)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3OJghSkjlrs

uploaded mine;

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5QhTNrNH-CU

looked better on the phone... btw audio at start is from me watching a video of it on mame rather than the pcb.

also embedded youtube links didnt seem to work ([tube][/tube])

grobda2014-09-10 19:48:27

 

[Big Phil]

I have one of these working and one working without the background.

I'll have a check on Friday when I get home if I get the chance.

 

[grobda]

http://mametesters.org/view.php?id=232

known bug in mame, and has been for 4 years by the look of it... so mine IS fixed

grobda2014-09-10 19:53:44