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…

GA2.jpg

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).

ROMs.jpg
And I thought Konami mask ROMs were bad…

I programmed six replacement 27C160 EPROMs. The end result looks a bit ugly but at least now I have two working PCBs…

GA2_2.jpg
Looks rather unsightly but ROM labels will help…

Fix

PCB 1: Replace IC26, IC27 and IC32 16Mb mask ROMs.

PCB 2: Replace IC27, IC28 and IC14 16Mb mask ROMs.

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