Author: James R. Twine
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9000A-Z80 Pod (Fluke)
Bought this Pod in “tested good” (yeah, right!) condition from a surplus company. Pod passes its self test without any problems, so I naturally trusted the results and thought that the Pod was working correctly. Turns out that the pod was not working correctly, but I did not figure this out until tearing apart a…
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To Design or Not To Design?
One of the things I have noticed is that the ideals of design are often misused or misapplied. More often than not (in my experience), this happens more often with developers that have more academic experience than real-world experience. Nothing is worse than a recent CS graduate with a masters degree that has less than 2…
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Notice to all Arcade/Game-Room Operators: Play Your Games!
One of the things that all arcade owners and staff should do, but almost never do, is to play their own games.
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Cook Race (bootleg Burgertime)
Some sprites are missing, but still in the game. For example, when you throw the Pepper, it is not drawn on the screen, but it still stuns the bad guys. One or two of the bad guys are also invisible, so Peter Pepper can effectively get killed by nothing! Game does not draw garbage where…
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Dig-Dug (“Has a ROM Error”)
Purchased described as “Has a ROM error“. Started by creating a JAMMA adapter, and then read the EPROM at 2E, it was not found under Romident, burned and installed a replacement. No change. Removed and read all ROMs in row/column 2, and all but one of them failed to be identified by Romident, burned and…
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Gyruss (Konami, bootleg)
Boots and passes self-test, but immediately coins itself up and starts playing itself(!), although not too well. Well, it looks like some of the inputs are firing rapidly and randomly. Grounding one of the enable pins on one of the 74LS253s seems to make it settle down for a few seconds, so I will try…
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Kicker (Konami)
Random garbage (no sprites) and occasional random sounds, reboots randomly. Clock looks good, CPU and bus address and data lines have what appears to be otherwise normal activity (i.e. nothing appears stuck or floating). Pulled EPROMs and Romidented them; Romident does not identify all but 2 of them, and the two that are identified are…
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Galaxian – “Dead”
Purchased described as “dead”. Started by creating a JAMMA adapter (I hate creating adapters, it is tedious work). Well, the description was correct – she is dead alright: screen has static garbage and required some tweaking to sync correctly on my test bench monitor. Watchdog is barking, disabling it has no effect on the screen’s…
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PAC-MAN (Midway, single board)
Board 1 Flashing “1” in corner of screen. Took a look at the Pac-Man troubleshoot by picture guide and that pointed me to “4R video RAM bad”. Swapped it, no good! Tried swapping other RAMs, no change either. Started pulling all socketed chips and found a bent pin on the ROM at 6E! straightened it,…