Tuesday, 29 May 2018

Popeye pcb (bootleg) repair

I bought this Popeye bootleg pcb in a lot of faulty boards, it included the worse jamma adapter I've ever seen. It's made from another cut up pcb, anyone know what game it was?


The board was working apart from the character layer of the graphics, making the text scrambled and blue blocks appear over the background and other sprites.



I didn't notice at first but blue and green were also switched, this was an issue with the adapter though and not the board.

The first thing I did was dump all the eproms and make sure they matched the ones in mame. Eprom 5 failed but this was a red herring as it was fine even though it's not in mame. :)

This did lead me in the right direction though as the data causing the issue is stored on this rom, it looked much better with it removed from the board. So I started looking around this area, I piggybacked a 2114 ram @ F8 and things looked much better, leaving the ram in place and power cycling the board completely fixed the issue.



I replaced the bad ram and made a new jamma adapter.




The colours are now correct, repair complete.

6 comments:

  1. Hi. Do you have schematic of bootleg PCB?
    I have problem with sprite renders on my board (pictures here)
    https://twitter.com/itmuseumua/status/1117761548414590976
    I think, problem in the counters LS161A but without schematic it hard to find.
    Thanks

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  2. Schematics don't exist for the bootleg board I am afriad, at least not publicly.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is there a way to replace the character rom chips with copies of the original character rom chips so it shows the copyright information on the title screen like the original? I just bought this original popeye arcade thinking it was all original but it has this bootleg board. Knowing its a bootleg annoys me to no end, but seeing on the screen that it also is a bootleg is just too much of a turn off. Its for my own personal use and collection.

    ReplyDelete
  4. It's possible to hack the bootleg roms to add the copyright info but not easy. The roms are all very different to the Nintendo ones, it would take someone with a lot skills and mame knowledge to do it (not me hehe).

    Personally I'd try and track down an original board, especially if you've got an original dedicated cabinet.

    If you're determined to get it done, your best bet would be arcade-project.com forums, there's some skilled rom hackers on there. You'd probably have to offer some cash incentive.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I just got a board like the one on the picture above a couple of weeks ago. please bare with me i'm a noob. the 8.000mhz oscillator fell down at unpacking. I ordered it and will get it on Friday 19th. my question is... is this board supposed to work on a dkjr standup cabinet?
    My cabinet has pin board connectors I already bought the Pin to edge connector and also ordered the rainbow cable.
    please enlighten my lack of knowledge... thx for any info

    ReplyDelete
  6. Hello
    I have an original Popeye pcb that is not working, can I send it to you for repair? Regards

    ReplyDelete