Search Results : “double dragon”

Oct 302021
 

I’ve worked on a few of these boards before so I knew straight away that I should be able to access the components side on both PCB’s when it is all screwed together but on this board set the video PCB was showing solder side out.
This doesn’t necessarily cause damage if powered up but its obviously not going to work either.
I switched it back around and when I did I noticed that the crystal on the video PCB was completely missing.

I had a spare 12 MHz crystal so I fitted that. Without that crystal fitted you would get a blank screen.
I tested the game and it started it self test routine but failed on the 63701 with an “Error” and had some graphical issue too.

I had to hope the 63701 wasn’t actually at fault because that is an MCU with an internal ROM which I cannot replace easily.
The way the self test works is the MCU does its own self test and when it is complete it puts a value of 0x84 into the shared RAM at location IC22. The main CPU them reads this value when it is ready to and compares it to 0x84. If this doesn’t match then we get an error.
Looking at the schematics we see where the RAM is

I desoldered the RAM at IC22 and it failed an out of circuit test.

Replacing it cleared this error and allowed the game to boot.

Straight away I could see that sometimes there was a problem with the characters.

When they glitched so did the game title graphic too. It looked like they were being drawn twice overlapping each other. This led me to look for a counter issue, usually a 74LS161.

Following the VPOS signal on the schematics I came to some 74LS161’s. Found this one that has some excess solder on the legs. Touching this while the game was running cleared the issue so I just replaced it and the issue was fixed.

Now on to the remaining sprite issue.

Found 3 dead ROM’s on the video board which sorted all the graphics out when programmed up with the correct data.

 Posted by at 5:24 pm

Double Dragon II – The Revenge repair log #2

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Jan 252020
 

This board is a bootleg board but seems to follow the original fairly accurately.

On initial boot up this didn’t do a great deal but then other times it actually started up with various errors.

A fault like this always makes me look at the reset circuit.
This board uses a 6809 as the main CPU and a Z80 as a sub CPU.
The reset pin for the 6809 is pin 37 and using the scope I could see that most of the time it didn’t do what a reset should do.
Tracing it all back I came to this

The reset circuit on this is as simple as it gets really with a capacitor, resistor and diode.
I removed and replaced the capacitor and now the game boots up every time.

Now, although the game booted it appeared to crash when entering attract mode or starting a game with this fault

I remembered Bryan McPhail had the very same issue some time ago and he mentions that the sub CPU needed to be running.
Checking the ROM for the sub CPU I found pin 1 (A15) was dead. Further inspection of the solder side of the PCB I found this

I patched this up as neat as I could and covered it using an overcoat pen

Now the issue was fixed

Last thing to do was deal with the sound.
My initial inspection of the PCB showed the volume pot had been messed with

I removed it and found some bad track damage underneath and on top

I fitted a new pot and patched all this up nicely but I still had no sound.
Tracing it out revealed that the bootleggers mixed up the two SPEAKER connections so SPEAKER+ was connected to SPEAKER- on the JAMMA edge and vice versa.
I spoke to Muddymusic to see what he wanted me to do. The option were hack the board to swap them or make an adapter. The prior option was chosen and I cut the two traces and ended up with this solution.

Now everything works great

 Posted by at 6:53 pm

Double Dragon repair log #10

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Sep 292019
 

Another PCB from Olly. Not sure if this is a bootleg or not but it is certainly of lesser quality than the other Double Dragon boards I’ve had.
Anyway, on boot up we get this mess but at least it boots

I pulled all the ROM’s on the video board to start with and found the 4 tile ROM’s dead.

I replaced these with 27C512 EEPROM’s which then gave me this

Much better but all the sprites are missing.
Looking at the schematics I could follow them through testing from the ROM’s onwards.

I ended up at a 7425 where all the inputs were active but the output on pin 8 was dead

I replaced this and tested again. All the sprites were back on the title screen but the in game sprites had coloured blocks around them.

Seeing as though I had 4 dead ROM’s I decided it wasn’t too ridiculous a thought to think that some of sprite ROM’s were dead too.
After confirming that the sprite ROM’s were being selected correctly I pulled them all and checked them.
I found 1 dead ROM here

Again I replaced it and tested

All graphics now fixed, the sound however was a different story.

The sound effects were all messed up but I could hear the music was fine in the background.
I pulled the two PCM ROM’s and tested them. Both failed.
Replaced these too and tested

All fixed.
7 dead ROM’s and 1 TTL. Not sure whether the ROM’s are just getting too old now or if they were taken out by a voltage problem.

 Posted by at 5:42 pm

Double Dragon repair log #9

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Oct 292016
 

Yes, yet another Double Dragon PCB on the bench.

The board was in good shape:

100_8956

but it didn’t pass the self-test sitting on a ‘63701 ERROR:

100_8959

The /HALT line of the HD63701 MCU was asserted, this was sign of some trouble in its busses.I swapped a good chip with no change so I went to look at schematics.All was good until I found no continuity between the address line ‘A0’ (pin 50) of the MCU with pin 3 of the 74F157 @IC8:

hd63701_bus

Tracing back the address line I could figure out where connection was  interrupted, exactly under the 74F157 @IC7 so I removed it.Inspecting the involved area with a USB microscope revealed a corroded trace  :

bad_trace

I patched it with some AWG30 wire:

100_8979

With this fix finally the board passed the self-test but two issues were present in game : sound was missing and backgrounds had jailbars :

The first issue was due a missing 10Kohm potentiometer in the sound section:

100_8981

The backgrounds GFX data are stored into four 27512 OTP devices on video board :

bg_romsjpg

When I went to dump the ones @IC108 ans IC109 my programmer warned me about a bad contact on pin 19 (data line ‘D7’) of both :

 

27512ic109

Obviously the resulting dumps didn’t match the ones from MAME ROM sets so I programmed two 27C512 EPROMs as replacement.This restored graphics completely.Yes, yet another Double Dragon PCB fixed!

 

 Posted by at 11:46 pm
Jul 122016
 

Had this original Double Dragon II – The Revenge in my faulty boards pile so I deciced to take a look it hoping to fix it and complete the trilogy in my collection:

DSCN3795

Once powered it up I was greeted by this static garbage screen:DSCN3797

A static screen is a clear sign of some trouble in the main code execution.So, for first, I went to dump the program ROMs and found a bad device which game me different checksum at each reading.Since my ROM set was an undumped japanese one, I was forced to convert my board into the US set which is available.This did not lead to any improvement so further investigation was needed.When I removed the EPROMs, I noticed that the socket @IC63 (the one of the bad EPROM) was oxidized:

DSCN3798

I decided to replace it.When , before installing the new one, I was checking all the connections, I found an eaten trace underneath which should have tied pin 2 of the 74LS138 @IC64 (which generates the /CE signals for program ROMs) to pin 9 of a 74LS273 @IC71:

broken_trace_IC63_

Once restored the connection board finally booted up but with severe sprites issues and corrupted/missing sound FXs:

Probing RAMs on video board I found some data lines stuck low on a TMM2015 @IC83 :

DSCN3816

This was due two broken traces on solderside which I promptly patched:

broken_trace_IC83

This improved a little the issue giving back the missing lines to sprites but they were still wrong and garbled.Looking at MAME source, I could figured out that one of the two Z80 (the one @IC50) on top board is used as sprites CPU which takes data from a 27512 EPROM @IC37 and write/read them on a 6116 SRAM @IC24 :

srpites_CPU_circuitry

Probing this static RAM (actually a Sanyo LC3517BSL compatible with 6116) revealed weak signals on its address bus:

DSCN3819

Once removed the chip, it failed when tested out-of-circuit:

TMM2015@IC24_reworking

With a good RAM chip all the sprites were correctly restored :

sprites_restored

So I moved to troubleshoot the sound FXs issue.Samples are played by an OKI MSM6295 @IC74 with takes data from two 28 pin 1Mbit MASK ROMs @IC39 and IC40:

ADPCM_circuitry

Probing the two MASK ROMs revealed that data came out when requested so the problem had to be in the OKI MSM6295 chip which played them badly.I removed it :

DSCN3831

and put back a good one:

RSCN3833 This restored ADPCM samples.Board 100% fixed and board trilogy complete!

 Posted by at 7:21 pm  Tagged with: