Phoenix pcb pinout (button 2 / shield)

I've noticed people mention Phoenix boards that don't have button 2 / shield. While this is possible I think it's unlikely and more likely the Jamma adapter isn't wired correctly.

This board which I assume is a german boot (spiele) uses the exact pinout found every where online apart from the shield buttons. This board has P1 button 2 on pin H and P2 button 2 on pin 7.

Anyway I thought I'd make a note of this for anyone doing a google that has a Phoenix board with non working shield.

Legendary Wings (Aresu no Tsubasa) bootleg repair

At first I thought the colour green was missing but on closer inspection all colours were present, the background is obviously a mess though.

First thing I checked was some rams on the top board (2114s near the end of the board), shorting two data pins together made the background change colour so I was in the right area. The one closest to the edge was a different manufacturer to the other two and also improved the picture the most when having it's data pins shorted.

I removed it and fitted a socket / new 2114.

This fixed the colour / graphics issue, now on to the sound.

The sound was working but was noisy and distorted. I checked and replaced some caps these two were the worst.

10uf cap so not far off but look at that esr!

 After replacing the bad caps the sound was back to normal, repair complete.

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.

PC Engine Core Grafx II

Originally this was going to be a repair as it was sold as not working, but it turned out the included power supply had the wrong polarity. After cutting the plug off and soldering on a new one with the correct polarity it powered right up.

It doesn't stop there though, the system had a hole drilled in the side and a scart cable wired directly to the motherboard. Not only is this ugly it isn't very practical when you want to pack it away or move it. I forgot to take a before picture but here is one from the auction.

I never drill extra holes or add switches etc if I can avoid it because I think it looks ugly and like to keep things original looking as possible. However since there was already a hole drilled in the side and there's not really any neat way to fill it or cover it up, I decided to widen it slightly and fit a 8 pin mini din connector for the scart cable.

Now all I had to do was fit a mini din plug to the scart lead and fit a RGB amplifier pcb inside the system, the company that did the mod (Raven Games London) just soldered directly to RGB so the image was quite dark.

They also made the mistake of wiring the 5v pin to pin 16 instead of pin 8 and didn't have a resistor joining the two. This put the TV in RGB mode but didn't auto change the channel, a minor issue but worth it for the cost of a resistor.

They also only wired a single ground in the scart plug to audio ground, all the ground pins *should* be connected on the TV but this isn't always the case so after adding jumper wires to all the ground pins I fired it up and....

It looks great, if only I had a better game to play on it. :)

Capcom System 1 (CPS1) Fitting a heatsink to the A01

By far the most common failure on CPS1 motherboards is the Capcom A01 custom chip followed by rams. Unlike rams the A01 cannot be easily replaced and can only be found on other CPS1 (and CPS2) motherboards.

To help try and get as much more life out of these chips as possible I decided to order some heatsinks and fit them to all my working boards (thanks to Winklepicker on J+ for the idea).

As you can see from this bad A01 I took a dremel to the die is quite small (1 cm x 1 cm).

I then went on RS looking for a suitable heatsink, there are 1 cm x 1 cm copper heatsinks on ebay sold for raspberry pi's but they would look a bit silly on a chip this size, they are also very short. It's my understanding that the bigger the better when it comes to heatsinks as they disperse heat better.

So I ended up ordering one of these http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/heatsinks/7500885/ which covers the majority of the chip without blocking access to the pins (they may need reflowing in future) and is tall but not too tall to hit the B board that plugs in above it.

The sticky backing these heatsinks came with is pretty poor so I removed it and instead used Phobya which is a 2 part thermal compound you mix and it dries like glue. I already had this on hand from fitting heatsinks to ULA (zx spectrum) and SID (c64) chips in the past.

The finished result (yes I need to clean that flux up).