PCB Repair: Golden Axe: The Revenge of Death Adder
Problem
Jail-bars through sprites and backgrounds:
Diagnosis
I had two PCBs which exhibited similar faults. Both System 32 motherboards were confirmed good with the use of a Spider-Man ROM board, meaning that the problems had to reside on the ROM boards. Uh oh…
The sprite graphics are contained in IC25-32 and the backgrounds are stored in IC14 and IC15. All these mask ROMs are 16Mb and are pin equivalent to a 27C160 EPROM.
I removed and read every graphics mask ROM. On each PCB, I found three defective ROMs, with IC27 faulty on both PCBs (this meant I couldn’t have one PCB with all good mask ROMs; grrr).
I programmed six replacement 27C160 EPROMs. The end result looks a bit ugly but at least now I have two working PCBs…
Fix
PCB 1: Replace IC26, IC27 and IC32 16Mb mask ROMs.
PCB 2: Replace IC27, IC28 and IC14 16Mb mask ROMs.
