Konami Viper PCB repair

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kaf2000

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The dip switches make no difference (different screen but game won't start).

Pressing the chips with the ball solder contacts makes no difference.

The video ram doesn't get hot.

The ram has 100 tiny legs per module, 400 in total. And then there is all the re-balling. Therefore the board is scrap, as far as my abilities go. I will let the owner know.

Retroman - if you fixed a board, would you consider selling it back?!

The cabinet (inc monitor) will be adapted to a mame light gun machine, if a replacement working board doesn't turn up before then.

Thanks for everyone's help!
 
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kaf2000

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Retro Leisure have said that they are willing to repair this at a reasonable price and that they have never had to scrap one of these boards. Has anybody had any experience with Retro Leisure?

Thanks.
 
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kaf2000

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Okay...

So I've had this Silent Scope Fortune Hunter viper board repaired.

All boots up now fine.

The gun screen is displaying the graphics perfectly, but the main game monitor graphics are still blocky and corrupted looking.

If the gun screen is working fine, does that rule out faulty ram? Could this be a faulty monitor?

The power supply voltages are correct - 12.08v and 5.1v.

The screen out connectors on the motherboard are identical. Are the sniper screen and monitor connections interchangeable, so I can see whether the game looks okay on the sniper monitor?

Thanks - Keith
 
Retroman839

Retroman839

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yes great idea...

hey i did a load of rtc rom burning
a little while ago
amd i researched it as much as i could.

konami bad rtc / suicide clock.
different games have different results from bad rtc.......
some
black screen nothing....
others result of bad rtc garbled gfx!
the other problem is
viper motorola cpu gpu ran a too high a temp
amd the bga solder fails...
reflow can fix but they then fail again sometimes spectacularly quickly.

--
 
K

kaf2000

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silent.jpg
 
K

kaf2000

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These are the images of what the screen looks like.

Not a monitor fault as when I swap the scope/monitor video outputs the gun screen image works fine on the main monitor and the monitor image is still corrupted on the gun screen.

The PSU voltages are all correct.

So I am guessing that this is looking like the same video ram fault as it had originally.
 
Retroman839

Retroman839

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is this the original monitor/cab ?
as poss a resolution issue
as medium rs 25khz.?
but yeh looks like gfx when missing a driver
so bad vram is very likely
just check your in the 25khz socket on chassi
and all 4 dips on side are in off position just rules out any res

most likely reball bga gpu + cpu
or faulty compact flash card.
Retroman8392020-12-12 16:02:45
 
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kaf2000

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Yes, this is the original monitor and cabinet - all untampered with.

When I swap the monitor connections, the problem swaps to another monitor!

And all four dips are off apart from the mirror flip.

The compact flash tests as fully okay in diagnostics too!
 
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kaf2000

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The RTC is supposed to be replaced and reprogrammed. There was some suggestion that although the PSU voltages are correct, they could be messy. Anyway, thanks for the help. Off back for re-repair.
 
Retroman839

Retroman839

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yeh i read that this board wants like 5v but i was advised to add more lines of 5v so i found an adaptor that was 5 volts and added that but mine never worked

gti club

and warzan i thi k thtas what is called!

anyway yeh i re programed both rtc but it was i think bad bga on either gpu and cpu

motorolla cpu and gpu are both shakey on these aparently notoriosly bad hardware

for breaking down chips get veryhot
 
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kaf2000

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No! This is all from memory as we are a good year or two ago and I was looking at this on behalf of somebody else. The general response on this forum was that these are impossible and expensive to repair, required some sort of highly specialist re-balling work (that wouldn't last long). The only well respected person that did this work only deals with corporate only jobs now, apparently. I passed this info back on the the owner, who insisted he had found somewhere that could work on the board. I warned him against it. The work cost hundreds and hundreds of pounds - but when it came back, big surprise, the screen was still corrupt, exactly the same (but the battery backed up chip had been replaced so the game booted beyond the settings screen and started - which was the only part of the job I could have done myself). I suspect the company then fed him some tale about how it was all definitely working 100 percent when it was sent out and that I must have had the voltages set too high, because he took the cabinet back and I have never heard from him again!

Shame because it seemed like quite a nice game and none of the home console light gun conversions can match the cabinet experience.
 
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kaf2000

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Not by me, so I suspect not. I didn't really get chance to go inside to see exactly what had been done - it was taken away. I think all they did was sort the dead RTC and when that didn't fix everything, they sent it back as fully working and washed their hands of it.
 
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