Eprom programmer power supply upgrade

I have owned a lot of different programmers but the Dataman 48Pro (Beeprog) is by far my favorite as it's fast, reliable and usb!. I'd even argue it's better than the new version as this one allows the use of standard adapters for non dip stuff. The newest one is far more locked down and forces you to buy expensive adapters.

It's great for the arcade hobby as it'll do oddball proms, pls153s etc, the only problem is it will some times come up with a warning about the power supply not being powerful enough and fail to burn some of these chips. That's because Elnec (Dataman) cheaped out and only included a 1amp power supply, a 4amp is what is needed to cover everything.

Why include a 4amp power supply when you can charge the customer another £100 for a 4amp one later. Well I'm not going to be paying that.

Thanks to Purity for sending me a picture of his original power supply from a Labprog+ which is the same as used on the 48pro. I also confirmed it with a meter but the pinout shown is correct.

So I needed a 15v 4amp power supply and a 6 pin mini din plug. A quick ebay search and I bought this old Laptop power supply for £5 and a plug for £2.50.

 

 Soldered them together and I can now burn any prom without issue for the total cost of £7.50. 😀

Space Firebird (Bootleg) Repair - Part 2

I couldn't wait until tomorrow to finish this repair. 😆 Being a Nintendo board the first place to start with a sound issue of this era board is the 8035 MPU . I don't have one... and they're getting quite hard to come by now but I remembered I bought a bunch of 8039s for Donkey Kong repairs. The 8039 has more internal ram than the 8035 but that's not a problem.

The 8039 brought the majority of the sounds back but no shooting sound. Using the audio probe on the op amps I could hear the shooting sound on one of the inputs but nothing on the output. Replacing the LM324 op amp and everything is now working.

Space Firebird (Bootleg) Repair - Part 1

Another Nintendo board for repair and the collection, I got this in a trade a good while back but have only just gotten around to making a jamma adapter and testing it. When doing a google search for a pinout a ukvac thread comes up where someone says that it's the same pinout as Phoenix, that isn't quite the case but more on that later.

When powered on I got an explosion sound and a starfield and not much else. There were a few dots and lines that were meant to be sprites. This turned out to be a bunch of bad 2101A rams on the video board, thankfully they're all socketed and I am able to test each one out of circuit in the Boardmaster. All but two failed, AMD branded.

I've had issues with AMD branded logic in the past too, maybe they should have just stuck to CPUs.😄

New RAMs fitted. This brought the sprites back and showed a new issue. All the bullets were on the very bottom of the screen under the player ship.

I went looking for counters on the video board, there's some very nice quality schematics for this board online which is a nice change from the usual no schematics or unreadable schematics.

Piggybacking didn't work but using a logic probe I could see the outputs on 74161 @ 4G were all shorted to ground, which also explains why piggbacking a good 161 on top didn't work.

 

Unusual brand of TTL on this board that I don't recognise which is usually a bad sigh but they work for now.

That fixed the bullets issue, a very hard game to photograph as it turns out.

 

 I took 40 pictures and that was the best of them.

 

That's all for now, I'll have to return to it at some point to see why I only get explosion sounds and the rest of the time it's completely silent.

Here's the pinout.

 

This is not at all the same as Phoenix pinout, the controls and video are on opposite sides, you also need -5v for Space Firebird as it has its sound data stored on a 2708 eprom.