Corrado Tomaselli

No background in electronics. Learned everything by reading pdf books and expecially Video game logic Vol 1 by Atari and in general early Atari and Williams arcade manuals

SSV system colours problem repair log

Aug 142019

Some months bought for my collection Vasara and Vasara 2 in bundle from an american guy.

From the beginning Inoticed that Vasara had very dimmed colours and required to adjust monitor constrast to the maximum in comparison to Vasara 2.

Since I was not familiar with this system I thought it was due to the motherboard revision which is earlier on Vasara ( and there is a factory mod to make it compatible)

After some months I decided to check on internet if someone had a similar problem and I found mentioned on system11 blog about Cave CV1000 colour problems.

Repair – Cave CV1000 colour problems

According to him it’s a very common problems on SSV games and I found also mentioned on japanese blog sites afterward.

I checked with the oscilloscope the signals coming out from the 4 2sc1674 transistors ( RGB ans SYNC) and indeed all of them very about 2volts, same intensity of the inputs.

Signals in Vasara 2 in comparison were about 3,5V

I decided to change all of them and indeed it fixed the dimmed colours which are now very bright and crisp

What I find really curious is that all of them went faulty, I think probably the transistors choosen by Seta are not correct for this kind of load.

Maybe someone with a good electronic background can shed a light

Pacmania repair log #3

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Aug 132019

Got another Pacmania faulty.

This time the sprites were glitchy with some black lines

Custom 39 is usually involved in sprites generation but after testing with a good one problem remained.

There are two 74ls377 connected to it and one @A3 has one missing output.

Changing it fixed the board

Popeye repair log #2

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Aug 132019

Received this board from a friend which booted to a static screen

Decided to have a look immediately to the 2k work ram which was a Toshiba which is normally prone to faults.

Changed with an Hitachi 2k

And game 100% fixed with no other errors

Vanguard Centuri Sync mod

General Comments Off

Apr 302019

A friend of mine sent me a couple of Vanguard pcbs which didn’t sync at all on all monitors I tested.

The only difference I saw was that his pcbs were Centuri versions while my pcb which synced good was SNK version.

Centuri versions on the video board have a factory mod with some flying wires which are not documented on the schematics and which are related to the sync circuit.

SNK version has no flying wires on the video board:

offcourse undoing the factory mod on the century board fixes the sync problem but I wanted to learn something more.

It seems that Centuri versions were modified to use the positive sync monitor supplied in their cabinets and probably they also improved the sync

signal in comparison to the original circuit.

Anyway , if you want to keep the mod but invert the sync for common monitors or TVs, you have only to solder the wire which goes to pin 3 of the 74LS05 marked in red

to pin 4.

Switching Power Supply Sanwa SNW7-E repair log

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Apr 302019

While cleaning the storage I found a very interesting power supply made by Sanwa and marked SNW-7E which works with 110 or 220V

The model SNW-7F is the same model working with only 110V

It’s a very nice and compact power supply ( with a tendency of getting really hot!) and I learned that it was used on the most famous japanese superguns .