Power Drift PCB Repair

[dj_yt]

I'd accumulated 3 broken or untested Power Drift PCBs. All three completely black-screened and showed no signs of life. I decided it was time to try to get at least one of them working. They are difficult boards to find working and I've always fancied playing the game in my OutRun cab.

The Y-Board is complicated, using 3 68k processors, a z80 for sound and loads of custom chips. So when faced with a dead board, there are a lot of potential candidates. Using the scope, I could see the main 68K CPU was resetting every few seconds. There seemed to be good activity on the data and address lines however.

I tested the Main CPU EPROMs first and they all seemed to be bad?! To be honest, I don't know how much I trust the GQ-4X with 27C1000 EPROMs.... it seems inconsistent. But anyway, all the NEC D27C1000 branded ones failed romident. I programmed some new ones, and pinched a few others from one of the other spare PCBs.

The board then booted into life, but with lots of graphical corruption. Amazing - I've never had such an easy fix before. However, the game completely crashed after a short period of time.

Using the scope again I could see that the 'Sub X' CPU (Mame driver naming) had no activity on the data or address bus. The 'Sub Y' CPU seemed to be behaving sensibly. At this point I replaced ALL the NEC branding EPROMs for both CPUs.

The game then ran consistently without crashing, however there were occasional graphical errors.

I swapped the lower video PCB out with one of the other spares and this solved the remaining graphical issues. Unfortunately it was quite late at this point and I forgot to take photos of my progress.

So there you go - not really the most technical fix-log ever. But a fix is a fix, and I'll have a poke around the remaining 2 PCBs next. I also need to hook up some controls.

 

[bonehead]

Well done and thanks for the write up. Enjoy the game.

 

[Hurray Banana]

A fix is a fix. great game to fix

 

[cparsonsuk]

 

[Brettster]

Great news indeed
and a great game too

 

[Purity]

Well done fella. Amazing. I've found that most of my bottom boards are absolutely fine, but all the top boards seem to die very easily :-(
Purity2017-11-12 14:52:37

 

[eLWaN]

Hi there,

I recently bought an arcade cabinet Power Drift but I got 2 issues.

1 - I got no sound but I can sometimes hear "brrrk krrriiiik" so I think the amplificator is ok but that the soundchipset on the PCB has issue (or RAM)

2 - When I'm luncky I can play like 15 min, otherwise the game reboot a lot. As I already checked the voltage on the alimentation and on the PCB (on a random TTL which begins by 74LS) and it was ok. What could be the issue here?

Could you please help me? I'm a native french speaker from Belgium and I'm not perfectly bilingual but if I undesrtood well you also had a reboot issue, hadn't you? Was it the same as on the short video I made?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFNj4MUTl6w

Kr

 

[Purity]

That sounds and looks like a failed PCM chip, and possibly an issue with one of the CPU custom chips, which is causing the game to crash. Chris would have a better idea for sure

If it is either of those you would need to find donor chips from another PCB

Purity2019-06-03 20:28:20

 

[dj_yt]

Can you get it into test mode and see if the customs pass the checks?

Sound - are the sampled sounds playing too fast and/or the wrong time? That can be the custom but tough to say without seeing the pcb.

 

[ColinD]

Hi,

If the PCM chip has failed, you would still get some music, but missing the samples such as the drums and speech or might just sound very strange (and that can be down to ram also, with a good pcm chip) !! - Leave the chip well alone right now.

The sound circuit is quite simple, might well be a bad ram, eprom or operational amplifier chip.

If the game resets, I would say check the eproms and the ic sockets (and cpu's) for corrosion or try to re-seat them.

Go easy and gentle on the game boards , they can be easily damaged.

Regards, Colin

################

Salut,

Si la puce PCM échoue, vous aurez toujours de la musique, mais certains échantillons tels que batterie et paroles vous manqueront, ou vous aurez peut-être un son très étrange (et ce pourrait être Ram, avec une bonne puce pcm)! ! - Laisse la puce tout de suite.

Le circuit de son est assez simple, pourrait être un mauvais ram, eprom ou amplificateur opérationnel ou plus ..

Si le jeu se réinitialise, je vous recommanderais de vérifier la corrosion des eproms et des sockets ic (et des processeurs) ou d'essayer de les remettre en place.

Allez lentement et doucement sur les plateaux de jeu, ils peuvent être facilement endommagés.

Cordialement, Colin

ColinD2019-06-03 21:25:48

 

[Bods]

My plan was to get get Power Drift pcb working in the outrun machine too

If I have space to keep this Turbo Outrun Cockpit I was thinking I could play it in that, still need to test my board though

Nice to see someone have success with these though as I worry about my Rail Chase, should of bought more Y-Boards really

Good advice from Colin there and I'm far from an expert on computer boards but to many start too deep with faults, the first things to replace for sound faults are the Op Amps, easiest part to replace and outrun sound faults it repairs at least half of them

I took that info and applied it too other boards with common sound issues and it's fixed all of the ones ivso far

If you don't have desolder station, Atari Manuals give you tips to remove faulty IC chips, Cut off the legs at top, need decent cutters, then remove whats left of the leg one at a time, you don't need to remove the Op Amp, just piggyback new one on top first. sound won't be perfect but you will get sound if you didn't before

I've got some Taito boards to look at sometime, I suspect if the last person that tried to repair them had tried Op Amps first they would be working, but they started removing major Yamaha Chips, damaging area's of the board and obviously never fixed it, just hope I can fix what they have destroyed then fix what I suspect will be a very easy fault