Phil Murray has very generously released all his files for his High Score Save Kits for Phoenix and Pleiades.
The archives contain all the gerbers, source code files and compiled files needed to make these up.
The files can be found at the following places on the PLD Archive wiki
Phoenix
Pleiades
If you use these files and enjoy them please consider sending Phil a thank you or a donation.
As of yesterday the PLD Archive wiki was locked for editing and it has been moved to the new domain of wiki.pldarchive.co.uk.
The link on this site has been updated but if you have bookmarks saved or whatever then these will need updated too.
As usual there will likely be broken links and errors so if you happen to find any then please do let me know. There is an email link on the main page of the new wiki. Likewise, if anyone has any PLD dumps or recreations, PCB pictures or IC pictures to contribute please also use that new email address to send them in.
Thank you
Over the last few months I’ve had tons of messages from readers of this blog asking about the lack of updates and all sorts of nice words so I think its time to address this officially here.
My interest in arcade repairs has pretty much dwindled down to nothing over the last 12 months or so and I have found myself finding a love for other hobbies which I am throwing myself into and loving them more and more.
That doesn’t really leave me with much free time for repairs and it certainly doesn’t leave me with any time to write up a detailed blog post about it either.
Right now, my official status on this is I wont be doing anymore repairs logs.
With that said I do put a lot of time and effort into dealing with PAL’s and will still be maintaining the WIKI and the blog will still stay with that too.
If the time comes that I wont be continuing with the site then it will either all be handed over to someone else that is willing to keep the information going or it will be saved and made available via other methods. I’m not going to let the last 10 years of work from myself and other contributors disappear.
Any of the other contributors can still post here if they wish and if anyone else wants to contribute then I will create an account for them too
I hope that puts a few minds at ease
Philmur has sent me his Pacman diagnostic ROM.
Pacman test ROM – philmurr 05/20
Fits at location 6E
Tests programme, colour, video and sprite RAM 1 (note sprite RAM 2 is write-only)
Displays sprites dropping from screen to show sprite select and addressing is working (tries to show all 8 but most boards only have 6)
Shows real-time status of inputs and DIPsColour RAM – 4P, 4L
Prog RAM – 4R, 4M
Video RAM – 4N, 4KSprite RAM 1 – part of 4R,4M but may make it clearer to people when testing
File can be downloaded in the “Downloads/ROM files/Diagnostic” menu
Thanks to Philmur for his hard work and for sharing this
The game at first didn’t boot due to the watchdog circuit being triggered.
There were 4 work srams by Toshiba and first one from left was faulty.
Unfortunately soon after , game started to reset again and the second sram from left failed.
The PCB had then all sprites in a single row and was missing the text on the upper and bottom area and soon after it losts also the BLUE component
Decided to start from the easy part and restored the missing colour.
Green and blue components are generated by the PROM @ 1N.
Signals were good so the fault was in the 74LS173@2P which had all output stuck at 0V
After changing the TTL I restored the blue component.
The missing text was due to the 74LS195@6L , while checking it I saw that the text reappeared but glitched
After changing it I finally had again the text
To restore the sprites I decided to concentrate on the \HSET signal on the sprite address generator circuit.
This signal comes from pin 22 of CUS35 and it was always stuck LOW. I took another CUS35 from a Baraduke board and the problem remained.
So I decided to look at the other side and checked two 74LS173@9N and 9P
I shorted for a brief moment the \Hset signal to 5V and the sprites were correctly drawn again and the signal was oscillating.
But I noticed that some sprites has some glitching on colours.
I decided to replace both of them
Board was 100% fixed
Of particular note is that all the faulty TTLs were by Texas Instruments ( not Fujitsu!) and of uncommon type.
It seems Namco had a stock of these ICs to be used on an hardware design 😉
Please note also that CUS35 is 100% compatible with CUS48 from later Namco system 1 games.