Phoenix sound repair

The siren sound from level 3 and 4 would play from the moment the board was powered up and kept repeating without ever stopping. It turned out there was a pin stuck high on 74LS32 @ IC34.

Vigilante repair

I received this board knowing nothing about it apart from the fact it didn't work, so first I look for the pinout online thinking it was prejamma for some reason but no there it is printed right on the edge connector JAMMA. That saved me some time, anyway on power up I see a screen of blocks much like in the Kung Fu Master repair and it was playing every sound one after another.

I fired up the trusty boardmaster 4000 it flagged both Z80 cpus and some near by 74LS245 buffers as faulty. It was unlikely that all four chips were bad, the boardmaster can give false readings but I decided to remove and test the cpus first and add sockets if I needed to use the fluke 9010a at all later.

It turns out I should have tested the 245s first as both cpus were fine and a quick check with a logic probe it was obvious both 245s were bad.

 
The game now boots up and works perfectly apart from the repeating and constant sounds. I checked the 74LS245 in the sound section with the logic probe and it didn't look right. I then piggybacked a good 245 on top and now the sound works 100%. I replaced the 245 and the repair is complete.

Looks like a bad batch of 74LS245s, maybe something to look out for on other faulty Vigilante boards?

Sorry about the lack of pictures I didn't have the camera to hand this time.

Using a Galep-4 on modern PC with Windows 7 (64bit)

I've had this programmer many years and it's always been my favorite as it supports a wide range of chips and is extremely reliable. The problem is as it's old it only supports a parallel port connection. My i7 PC doesn't have a serial port let alone a parallel one, so this means every time I want to use the galep I have to hook up an old ibm thinkpad and save / load any files using a usb pen.

Getting tired of this I went searching to see if anyone had come up with a solution to connect the galep 4 up using USB. The short answer is you can but it's extremely slow, no point in that so I almost gave up. After more searching I found reports of people having success using pci/e parallel port cards, not just that but there's also a 64bit driver for the galep software available now.

So I head to ebay and look for the cheapest pci parallel port card I can find and this one comes up, £2.98 including postage! crazy cheap. I was a little too quick hitting the buy it now button because although the description says it supports windows 7 it doesn't mention 32/64bit hmm. After checking the driver cd sure enough only 32bit drivers.

Before buying a more expensive card that has 64bit drivers I did a bit more googling to see if there were newer and more importantly 64bit drivers for this generic card. Luckily I found an amazon listing for this card with a driver link, they no longer sell the card but the link still worked.

The rar file included 64bit drivers woot!


Next I installed the latest Galep32 software (1.20.4 at the time of writing this) and then followed the instructions here to install the galep 64bit driver. I loaded it up and it worked first time, now the awful GQ-3X programmer can be retired yay.