Hi all , Thought I would post my latest repair on here and with any luck it will help others out. I apologise now for my bad spelling and grammar ! Listed as much as I can, And tried to explain as much as I can without people falling asleep while reading. Its my first time posting so go easy on me. If you enjoy reading leave a comment and I will post more as when I get them.
Ok Today its the fantastic, And quiet brilliant Wonderboy from 1986. I have very fond memories of playing this game as a kid and even though I never got to far I still kept sticking the coins in when I had them spare ( Not very often, Never had much money when we were younger :-( so watching became second best ). I have been looking for this on the sega system 1 or 2 original but people are asking crazy money and my only options was to buy one when a bargain came up, Convert from a Choplifter or get a bootleg that was the right price. Thanks to Brownja (James) I purchased a none working Bootleg for a good price and it arrived shortly after and I popped on the bench. First off James had kindly done images of the issues so I was aware of them before I started. The game booted fine but the graphics were all over the place. There was no start sign at the begging and wonderboy was behind the background. You could see him if you jumped though. Also the title screen colours were not correct and there was a lot of Static on the screen. It was clear from the get go there were Sprite/Title issues. Lines missing in text and colour issues. Notice the bad colours on the wonderboy lives and axe ect. Pictures don't show issues brilliantly but anyway :-
So I started with the usual Stuff :-
1) Visual Check - All ok Board very clean. A few dark spots on some tracks but continuity was fine. Had a few repairs in the past but been a while. ( There is a wire shorting out a dip switch - Not causing any issues. Will see what that is at some point )
2) Remove all socketed IC's, Cleaned and reseat them. - No Change
3) Check and verify all roms - Srites roms OK , Titles roms OK , CPU / Sprite roms OK, Audio Roms didn't verify - mmmmmm ok but audio is working, Rom 10 did not verify either - mmmmm not sure on this.
4) Check all 3 ( Yes 3 ! Z80 cpu's )- All ok no issues
So I tried to see what Roms the board should have and its a bit of a mash up from what I can tell. It uses some Roms from US Bootleg , Some CPU's from original and some are mashed together (Sprites and CPU in one ) from the 4-D Warriors Conversion. I am not sure what this board actually is, If anyone can shed some light on what this actually is then please post. It looks to me that this board is not completely dumped - hence the 2 roms not verifying.
Ok next we needed to make a 22 pin sega to jamma adapter. Not a hard job but time consuming. Luckily the game came with a harness so I used the 22 pin connector and popped it onto a jamma fingerboard.
Ok so we power the board up and start to see whats going on, And we get the same results as expected - Bad gfx. Good thing is all the audio is working so that's one less thing to do.
I am aware of issues with the daughter boards causing graphics issues so I removed and cleaned all contacts and tested the for continuity. Everything seemed ok as far as I could tell. I removed the board and fired the game up and apart from the sync issues (GAL chips control this) the problem was still there. This does not always tell us the board is ok as the daughter board may control the graphical inputs / outputs but unlikely to be that. I decided to probe it anyway to see if I could see anything obvious but as far as I could tell it was ok.
So time to move to the main board. I removed the roms one by one to see if I could find what was doing what, Not much to say about that but no changes no matter which one I pulled. I then started to probe the main board and after probing for a while I spotted a very weak signal coming for A LS377 @ V10. I traced it to the next IC an LS273 @ W10. So as all the other pins were ok on the IC I decided to short 2 pins to ' Force ' pin to open and wonderboy Jumped to the front !!!! So we now know we are close.
There are 3 chips the data runs through and I was feeling very lazy and could not be bothered to fire the scope up so I decided to removed the one that Was the most likely - The LS377. I removed and re socketed it and fired it up and the wonderboy was now back !!! For around 20 seconds and then disappeared behind the trees again, Damn it !.
So now it had to be the LS273 @ W10. I removed the chip and popped it in my tester (Didn't do this with the LS377 , Bad practice !) and it tested BAD. Did not have any new so I robbed one from a donor board and popped it in. Fired the board up and wonderboy is now back. Few !
Now to look at the graphics issues. As the chip @ X10 is an LS273 and the same make as the faulty one I decided to swap it out anyway as there was a very big possibility that this would be faulty as well. And I also knew this controlled the output gfx for the game. The chip tested BAD. Fitted new socket and fitted yet another salvaged LS273 in.
Boooooooom colours are all back, Titles correct colour and static as also now gone. Big sigh of relief. Was getting late and my controller is really crappy (Homemade tactile switches to test with - Not designed to play !! ) but managed to have a few games. I will say that this seems to play really well considering its a bootleg.
So we have saved another game from the scrap / Parts Bin and a great addition to my collection. Big thanks to James for the board.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoy reviving dead boards, If only my SF2 was this easy ! Cant wait to get this in a cab and start playing again.
Thanks,
Dave.
P.S I am always looking for none working boards so if you have any for sale then please do hesitate to contact me. I don't do these to sell, I do them so they can be played and enjoyed by me ! I have a few in my collection but always need more.
Ok Today its the fantastic, And quiet brilliant Wonderboy from 1986. I have very fond memories of playing this game as a kid and even though I never got to far I still kept sticking the coins in when I had them spare ( Not very often, Never had much money when we were younger :-( so watching became second best ). I have been looking for this on the sega system 1 or 2 original but people are asking crazy money and my only options was to buy one when a bargain came up, Convert from a Choplifter or get a bootleg that was the right price. Thanks to Brownja (James) I purchased a none working Bootleg for a good price and it arrived shortly after and I popped on the bench. First off James had kindly done images of the issues so I was aware of them before I started. The game booted fine but the graphics were all over the place. There was no start sign at the begging and wonderboy was behind the background. You could see him if you jumped though. Also the title screen colours were not correct and there was a lot of Static on the screen. It was clear from the get go there were Sprite/Title issues. Lines missing in text and colour issues. Notice the bad colours on the wonderboy lives and axe ect. Pictures don't show issues brilliantly but anyway :-
So I started with the usual Stuff :-
1) Visual Check - All ok Board very clean. A few dark spots on some tracks but continuity was fine. Had a few repairs in the past but been a while. ( There is a wire shorting out a dip switch - Not causing any issues. Will see what that is at some point )
2) Remove all socketed IC's, Cleaned and reseat them. - No Change
3) Check and verify all roms - Srites roms OK , Titles roms OK , CPU / Sprite roms OK, Audio Roms didn't verify - mmmmmm ok but audio is working, Rom 10 did not verify either - mmmmm not sure on this.
4) Check all 3 ( Yes 3 ! Z80 cpu's )- All ok no issues
So I tried to see what Roms the board should have and its a bit of a mash up from what I can tell. It uses some Roms from US Bootleg , Some CPU's from original and some are mashed together (Sprites and CPU in one ) from the 4-D Warriors Conversion. I am not sure what this board actually is, If anyone can shed some light on what this actually is then please post. It looks to me that this board is not completely dumped - hence the 2 roms not verifying.
Ok next we needed to make a 22 pin sega to jamma adapter. Not a hard job but time consuming. Luckily the game came with a harness so I used the 22 pin connector and popped it onto a jamma fingerboard.
Ok so we power the board up and start to see whats going on, And we get the same results as expected - Bad gfx. Good thing is all the audio is working so that's one less thing to do.
I am aware of issues with the daughter boards causing graphics issues so I removed and cleaned all contacts and tested the for continuity. Everything seemed ok as far as I could tell. I removed the board and fired the game up and apart from the sync issues (GAL chips control this) the problem was still there. This does not always tell us the board is ok as the daughter board may control the graphical inputs / outputs but unlikely to be that. I decided to probe it anyway to see if I could see anything obvious but as far as I could tell it was ok.
So time to move to the main board. I removed the roms one by one to see if I could find what was doing what, Not much to say about that but no changes no matter which one I pulled. I then started to probe the main board and after probing for a while I spotted a very weak signal coming for A LS377 @ V10. I traced it to the next IC an LS273 @ W10. So as all the other pins were ok on the IC I decided to short 2 pins to ' Force ' pin to open and wonderboy Jumped to the front !!!! So we now know we are close.
There are 3 chips the data runs through and I was feeling very lazy and could not be bothered to fire the scope up so I decided to removed the one that Was the most likely - The LS377. I removed and re socketed it and fired it up and the wonderboy was now back !!! For around 20 seconds and then disappeared behind the trees again, Damn it !.
So now it had to be the LS273 @ W10. I removed the chip and popped it in my tester (Didn't do this with the LS377 , Bad practice !) and it tested BAD. Did not have any new so I robbed one from a donor board and popped it in. Fired the board up and wonderboy is now back. Few !
Now to look at the graphics issues. As the chip @ X10 is an LS273 and the same make as the faulty one I decided to swap it out anyway as there was a very big possibility that this would be faulty as well. And I also knew this controlled the output gfx for the game. The chip tested BAD. Fitted new socket and fitted yet another salvaged LS273 in.
Boooooooom colours are all back, Titles correct colour and static as also now gone. Big sigh of relief. Was getting late and my controller is really crappy (Homemade tactile switches to test with - Not designed to play !! ) but managed to have a few games. I will say that this seems to play really well considering its a bootleg.
So we have saved another game from the scrap / Parts Bin and a great addition to my collection. Big thanks to James for the board.
I hope you have enjoyed reading this as much as I enjoy reviving dead boards, If only my SF2 was this easy ! Cant wait to get this in a cab and start playing again.
Thanks,
Dave.
P.S I am always looking for none working boards so if you have any for sale then please do hesitate to contact me. I don't do these to sell, I do them so they can be played and enjoyed by me ! I have a few in my collection but always need more.
