CAPCOM CPS2 ALL-IN-ONE BLACK MARVEL VS CAPCOM BATTERY CHANGE

Hey guys,

I've finally done it! I've finally grown the balls to tackle the battery change on my Capcom CPS2 All-in-one black metal case Marvel VS Capcom game. I've done a battery change on a regular CPS2 board, the plastic cased A board which you can do without the game connected but when it comes to the All-in-one games their different...

....you need to change the battery while the game is on!..

...WHILE IT'S TURNED ON!!!

haha, yeah that's why I've been putting off doing it. You need to keep the game on while you desolder the old battery and then solder in the new one. I mean, the process of changing the battery is super simple but doing it while the board is propped on its side so you can get easy access to the top and bottom makes it a lot more delicate. If you press too hard on anything the board will move, potentially slide and you can touch other parts of the board by accident with the soldering iron or your hand and short something. Or cause it to lose power, which while the battery is disconnected will just brick your game and it's phoenix time. Which is what I didn't want to happen.

So I set myself up as best as I could and did everything methodically and checked my work at each stage just because I wanted to be super careful and I love this game and really don't want to knacker it up.

Here you can see the offending battery, which to be honest was still in good shape. No leaking or bloating or anything. But it's been in there since 2011 and I wanted to get a fresh one in to help prolong the life of this game in it's original form.

Sorry this image is a screenshot from the video I made documenting my progress with this swap (see bottom of this post for video). I forgot to take a photo of it propped up as I was psyching myself up to go for the desolder haha. So this is how I had the game propped up. I electrical taped both sides of the edge of the board that's touching my hobby mat so that the game couldn't slide out from under itself. That would be pretty disasterous! And you can hopefully see its leaning against my plastic main soldering box. It's pretty heavy and with it leaning towards it the game can't fall forward as I work. And you can see the Jamma edge on there too.

And SUCCESS!!! Here you can see the game working with it's fresh new battery in place! WOO!! The actual swap was a simple job in the end, I was just super careful with how I put the solder sucker on there etc to desolder the old battery. I did have a little bit of a heart attack when I was cleaning the last bit of solder of one of the pads that looked like it might be obscuring a bit of one of the holes and it might make pocking one of the legs through a little tricky. I didn't realise but the games music had stopped! I looked over to my TV and the screen was frozen with the small Capcom logo in the middle bottom bit of the screen and the rest of the screen had a Patent number, Patent number text written all across the screen. I thought for sure it's dead and I'd moved the board too much or something. I was gutted. Well I finished putting the new battery in and trimmed its legs. Then I turned it off because I'd have to turn it off at some point to put the game away. And when I turned it back on the flippin' thing worked!! Man I was so happy! haha

So I did it! The battery change didn't take very long at all in the end and now I'd done it it's not that scary anymore. I must admit that I couldn't find much at all about changing the batteries on these boards just comments about doing it while the game is on. The only real posts I did find ended up being from a Blog written by the guy who owned this game! I bought it off him via Arcade Otaku. I recognised the scratches on the metal casing. So this game seems to be the poster boy for the battery swap :-P

Below is the video I made of the battery change each step of the way. Except for the actual battery swap. I was too scared to do that on video in case I messed it up worrying about talking on camera or if the camera was in focus or had fallen over etc.



So there you go, I wanted to post up something about the swap I did as information is fairly scarce on swapping out the batteries on these boards. And hopefully it'll help if you have an All-in-one and want / need to change the battery on it but don't really know how to go about it.

Good luck and see you soon

Porl''

WWF SUPERSTARS JAMMA ARCADE GAME REPAIR - PART ONE

Hi everyone,

Okay, its really really been a long time since my last post! Man lots have been happening over the past half a year and I've not really had the time to do any retro based projects as we've been doing a lot of re-arranging at home and painting and building etc. I have still been playing my retro consoles and getting some games every now and again but no where near the level I had been.

Well I had an afternoon free yesterday and decided to get my WWF Superstars board out of my little rack of games and decided to start trying to figure out the sound issue I showed in my last video.

I video'd yesterdays progress and made a quick video. This is the first part as I haven't fixed it yet but Im hoping to get back really soon. And it wont be an 8 month wait haha



Hopefully post again soon

Porl''

SEGA NAOMI CHASSIS SAGA CONTINUES

Hi everyone,

Been a little bit of a break between posts again I know but not as long as it has been in the past haha. We've had a chock-a-block-a couple of weeks and I'd been struggling to get some time in on the Naomi project with helping to setup for summer concerts (indoor and outdoor) practicing for playing in the concerts as well as helping to organise our wedding and our stag + hen do activities. So getting to posting some updates has been a little tight like a tiger. But! Hopefully we have a nice couple of weeks of summer holidays now and a more leisurely pace.

Well, As you probably read in my last post I had a real lemon of a monitor in the Naomi, and from some reading around on the forums I frequent I think it had been a problem for the owner at least a year before I won it on eBay. Bit crap really but I guess that's why I ended up getting it so cheaply. Anyway, nothing to it but try to get the sucker up and running.

So at the end of the last post I had my Naomi up and running via my Dreamcast and had a great time playing some Street Fighter 3 : double impact and Giga Wing. But the pin cushion controls weren't working so you couldn't get it to full screen without it pinching inwards from the sides quite a lot! Pretty annoying and obviously another fault on the chassis.

Well, the chassis lasted until I played on the machine again after having a good nose round it. It started looking like it wanted to scroll and then POP the line came back. I guess some parts of it gave up the ghost, again. So back onto the repair dude for thoughts and ideas because he'd been slowly eliminating problems as he went with my chassis.

Because I'd replaced the transistor already and it had gone again it had to be something else and Grant started thinking it could be a faulty Yoke or fly-back. Well I know what the parts of the monitor are now from doing research on them for the Naomi project but haven't got the first clue with how to diagnose and fix them. So off my chassis went again down south for Grant to do some more inspections and to soak test the chassis again on his spare tube to see if it would hold out. And if it did that would mean that I had an internally sparking Yoke or something.

I had a nose around the Yoke area after I sent the chassis off and found a piece of plastic that encloses some copper wiring was loose and flapping about so I mentioned this to Grant and super glued it back on. He said that this wouldn't be the problem though, so I glued it up so that it should help stop moisture getting into the Yoke area through that avenue.

The coiled up copper wiring on the white cone is the Yoke area. It was absolutely filthy around this area so I gave it a good ol' clean down to see if anything else looked a little suspicious.

The chassis was posted off and received and I waited to see how it would hold up to Grant's tests and started trying to do some internet research on getting hold of Sanwa 29" tubes or even worst case senario, 29" tv's to sub into place. Both lots of research basically came up bust though and it would seem I would need to drop a couple of hundred on a complete monitor and chassis if it show's up as my tube is faulty as spares for them seem to be non-existant anymore. :-(

The weekend comes and I get a PM and its good news, well for me. The chassis popped again on Grant's spare tube within about 20 minutes. This ruled out my Yoke being the issue which made me have a huge sigh of relief!!!

And with this happening it got Grant's head scratching again and he would have to really start delving into the chassis. This could take a while, so awesomely! This is a true example of the Arcade scene's helpfulness and friendliness. He offered to send me his spare working, repaired chassis to use while he spends some time diagnosing and repairing mine so that I have a Naomi to use and play on while he gets into the nitty gritty with my faulty chassis. What a dude!! :D

So while I waited for the spare chassis to arrive I started working away on my Mame PC setup. I've played Mame before on my desktop PC but I've never set up a machine just to play Mame on an arcade machine before so I had to do a lot of reading up on what to use and how to set it so that the resolutions are fixed so they don't damage my fragile monitor and so that there isn't screen tearing etc. The last thing you would want is to give the game away that it wasn't running real arcade hardware inside with crappy looking screen tearing!

I follow a guy on YouTube called Exmosquito who does 1CC runs of some of the hardest arcade games and he runs Mame on his arcade machine and thankfully he did a video a while ago explaining his Mame setup. It looks like it runs absolutely smoothly so I wanted to copy his setup so I could have a spot on machine.

He uses GroovyMame which is a modified version of Mame and he also uses the CRTEmu drivers which are designed to work on ATI graphics cards. So I set about sourcing all the parts for making up a small PC that would run GroovyMame out of my spares.

Typically I didn't have very many parts left over at all. Since I was a teenager I've been into PC's with my Dad and whenever we'd upgrade parts I would generally keep them as spares incase anything went wrong. And over the years I've kept doing this and whenever anyone's PC's needed replacements I've popped these spares into their machines to help fix them. So when it comes round for me to want to make another PC I couldn't as I've given all the spares I need away! haha blumin' typical!

So I went on the scrounge a bit. I remembered my Brother might still have his old motherboard and processor still from when we upgraded his machine a few months ago so I gave him a call and thankfully he did! So I nipped over to pick it up. A good start! I have a mobo and processor. Next I need an ATI graphics card, which no-one I know has so I sourced a nice looking ASUS Radeon HD4350 512mb Silent PCI-express card that's compatible with the CRTEmu drivers and some memory from the local CEX. Im trying to get this little machine running on the cheap cheap if you couldn't tell. Next thing is a Power supply which is easy as I have my spare modular Corsair HX520w psu which will work a treat. And the final thing, a hard drive. I recently had a PS3 Phat 60GB that I reflowed which lasted for a very short time before it was properly bricked so before I binned it I took the HDD out of that and hooked the sucker up. Perfecto! A nice little Mame PC on the pretty cheap.

I mounted it all to the Naomi wooden board so that I knew it would fit within the bottom box of the arcade machine and it ended up looking like this :D

Not too shabby I don't think haha. I set up a switch so that it could be turned on from the front and all the ports are easily accessable from the door of the Naomi and the power cable routes out of the back of the machine.

Next step is to get GroovyMame installed and a load of games loaded and wait on the chassis to return.

More in the next post! :D

Porl''

A NEW TOY / PROJECT : SEGA NAOMI UNIVERSAL MAME CABINET

Hi peeps,

It's been a little while since my last post. I've been itching to make posts about my new toy but I've been having nothing but trouble with it from pretty much the off so much so that I haven't gotten it to a stable position enough to make a post about it haha.

And the weird thing is I bought this under the impression that I could just plug this sucker in and play. Unfortunately that hasn't been the case.

Here is the beast, my very own candy cab! I must admit, I didn't think I would ever own a candy cab because they are so expensive!

Unfortunetly this isn't the view I had when I first got it home.

Right, how did I end up getting hold of a Naomi Universal cabinet in the first place?

Well I was sitting at our breakfast bar one evening after work with my Fiancé Rozzy and some how doing a random google search I came across an link to an ebay auction for a Mame ready naomi universal arcade cabinet. So being a nosey bugger I clicked the link and went through to the listing. It had 2 days to go I think and it had some bids but it was ridiculously low so I said to Roz that I might bid on it but I would never ever get it because it's going to go for at least £200. She said that if I did end up getting it for the measly sum I put in she would treat me as an early wedding present. But I was convinced that I wouldn't get it and to be honest, if I did win it where would I put it?! We live in a cosy small cottage and I don't have a garage haha.

Well, obviously I kept watching how the auction was progressing and no more bids came for a while and I was winning and thinking "crap! Im actually going to win this and I have no where to put it!!! what was I thinking!?" but it still had time and any arcade machines I normally watch for curiosities sake have a blitz near the closing time and shoot right up. Well finally another bid came but I was still winning. Then Wednesday lunchtime comes and Im watching for the Blitz like a hawk on my phone and .....I won it! I only went and blumin' won it and for the princely sum of £64!!!! £64 for a candy cab! And the description said that all I would have to do after collecting it was to plug in a Mame set up PC and it's ready to go! Wowzers!!

I had a bit of a panic about the whole situation to Roz and being awesome she got on the phone and sorted out with her family that I could keep it at their farm until we eventually end up getting a bigger house and I can take it home then. I had the idea that it could go up into our hobby room (this was before I saw how big it actually was and how heavy it is. jeez is it heavy!) but the floor wouldn't be able to hold this kind of machine as its an old place. So I have to store it and work on it at the minute.

Well, we borrowed the Discovery and headed off to Birmingham to pick it up and hope that it would fit in the back. We met up with the seller and had a good ol' chat and nose around his lock up which was packed to the gills with other arcade machines and spare parts. Pretty awesome! And the 3 of us, lifting with our legs, managed to get it to fit quite nicely in the back of the Discovery without any disassembly other than taking the top marquee out. Phew, that was a worry! I really wish I'd taken a photo of the machine in the back of the Disco but with all the excitement I didn't get my phone out. Oh well!

Off we trotted carefully back home in the Disco in rush hour traffic and got the machine out and across the yard to where I'll be working on the machine.

Super excitedly I looked over the machine, got my Dreamcast out of its carry case as the Dreamcast (VGA modded) should be able to plug straight into the Naomi and play straight off and plugged it in. Turned all the power on and I get an image on the screen but it is rolling like a maniac!! Vertical sync isn't working! The image filled the screen from what I could tell but it was scrolling really really fast. I switched off the Dreamcast and tried it a few more times checking the cable was sitting correctly but no go.

I tried my laptop set to 640 x 480 but got the same result :-(

Here you can see the Dreamcast image rolling and rolling and rolling.

So I gave up for the day and headed home and onto the Forums and google to get a hold of a manual and do some research.

The next day I went back to the Naomi with an idea that I'll take the back hood off the machine and hunt down the vertical hold / sync and get it adjusted to settle it down.

Unable to find a V Hold pot I started adjusting the H hold and got the image tuning in and out like you get with an Old TV tuning a station in. I got all the way to the left and got a vertical thin line. This must be the left hand side of the adjustment so lets turn right and see what happens when we get going. Turn......nothing......turn.......still nothing. I got a very cold feeling go down my spine with a realisation that it had just broken big time!!!! Oh man!! This was meant to be an easy plug and play system.

See the image to the left. This is all that happens when tried with either the Dreamcast or the laptop. Oh, and the thin vertical line is still rolling without Vertical sync.

So I got back on to the forum and I got chatting with a guy who is the go to man for repairing the chassis in Naomi's and he's confident that he can repair it.

Of I headed to take the chassis out of the machine and send it off for repair and he found a multitude of things that had gone wrong on the chassis. Cold solder, capacitors gone as well as the vertical transistor and safety resistor. I think I'd been sold a bit of a dog of a monitor set up within this machine. The machine as it is is sound even if it needs a little bit of work to tidy up but the main bit being the monitor seems a bit boned!

Anyway, after a week Grant sent me back my repaired chassis and I installed it into the cabinet and I get a full screen view but its got a twitch to it. It seems like its trying its hardest to roll but something is holding it back. You could really tell it was itching to roll. I adjusted the image with the control panel break-out board and had a quick go on Street Fighter 3 double impact on the Dreamcast. This go was without sound though as the speakers are mounted within the rear hood of the machine. So I got up and headed over to get the hood so I could plug the sound in and I heard a really loud SNAP!!. I quickly turned round and the thin, glowing vertical line was back! Flippin eck!! :-(

After some further PM's Grant really nicely sent over a replacement Transistor and resistor as he thought that the transistor was faulty. The next weekend I replaced the components and BINGO!! I got a steady image! Its on a slight tilt but not so much that the lay person could see without being told. I've got weird pincushion squeeze that I can't adjust out but I'm able to finally play some games on it using my Dreamcast and my Dreamcast arcade stick as I haven't got any pad hacks done yet.

Check it out! That's me playing some Street Fighter 3 Double Impact on the Naomi :D It's stripped down because of fitting the repaired chassis but its working and MAN IS THAT SCREEN BIG!!! It's like sitting in the cinema on the front row, you actually have to turn and really look around the screen or you'll miss something. Its awesome!!!

The pin cushion pinch is a bit anoying though as you can't get the image full screen without it pushing in at the sides so this needs to be adjusted (see right) but the next main job is building a Mame PC from as many spare parts as I can find so its nice and cheap as it's going to sit in the lower part of the Naomi perminantly and only play games. So it doesn't need to be any kind of real power house! And once the PC is working I can get the control panel hooked up via the iPac thats installed in there. :-D

Here's a few shots of the Dreamcast running on screen :

I've also made a video explanation of the progress so far so you can see it actually playing Street Fighter 3 Double Impact.

Looks pretty sweet I think!! :D

Geeky exciting stuff!!!

Catch you in the next update y'all.

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 4.5 - videos

Hi peeps,

Here is a small update for the last progress report. I finally managed to upload the video progress reports to Youtube over the weekend so I thought I'd post them up here while I carry on working on the cabinet.

I know you can see the progress in the photos but I always like to see arcade machines in action with the game up and running and yelling out of the way too loud speakers! haha :-P

Capcom CPS2 button demo:


Neo Geo MVS button demo:


catch you on the next update!!

Porl''

ARCADE MACHINE REFURBISHMENT - RESURRECTION PART 4. CONTROL PANEL MODS

Hi everyone,

I've made some more progress on "the Machine" this friday afternoon and it's starting to get there now :-D

The aim for the control panel was to get 6 buttons for each player so that I can play my Street Fighter games on there no problem. So I set about drawing out the positions for the new buttons on the control panel so that I could figure out if they would all fit. What I've found is Player One's part of the panel had more than enough room around the existing 3 buttons to get the others to fit. But Player Two's area is really cramped. It's like they ran out of room as they worked along from left to right. So between the 3rd button and the cigarette area is rather cramped. So this part of the panel is going to have to be a bit of a compromise.

Last weekend I'd tried to make a start on the control panel and thought that I would be able to drill out the hole like a little pepper pot with the largest metal drill that I had and then cut out the linking bits of metal with my Dremel. Well let me tell you, that isn't the way to go about drilling the holes out of a metal control panel. To get the one hole done it took me an hour and a half and I went through 2 grinding wheels on my Dremel. This way would take me forever and I would be buying new grinding tools every other button hole.

So I left it there last weekend and during the week I picked up a Holesaw along with the corresponding drill bit from Wickes and set about the control panel again. What a change using the proper tools makes! The holesaw made short work of the control panel and I breezed through this time.

Here is the second player's control area. You can see that button 6 has had to be squashed up to get it to fit. And I've had to fit the extra buttons a little closer to the original holes because of available space. It doesn't feel too tight to use.

 Here you can see the holesaw I used. Its a 29mm holesaw and the buttons fit perfectly into the space you drilled. I thought it might make holes that are a little too big but they are spot on.

One thing to remember though is take out the existing buttons when you start to do your drilling. I didn't do this and buggered up one of my buttons. :-( The holesaw generates lots and lots of really little metal flakes and they can go down the litte gaps around the buttons and jam them up a treat! Because the plastic is quite soft the metal seems to dig in really well and it doesn't feel like it will come un-stuck.

So I'm going to have to order another one to replace the stuck one.

Below you can see the backside of the control panel all wired up. It looks a little bit of a mess but it's as neat as I can get. I can't pull the harness wiring through any further because its pulling the jamma edge up too high for my smaller game PCB's to sit on the bottom of the machine.

You can see that Player One's buttons are laid out more traditionally than Player Two. The spacing is still not exactly how you would normally have it if you were to make the control panel from scratch. But its nice enough I think.

Once I'd gotten all the buttons wired in and tested I started working on a little idea I'd had during the week. One thing I found out from making my first arcade stick for my Super Gun was that if you make an arcade stick that is just 6 buttons you won't be able to play Neo Geo MVS games that require 4 buttons. This sounds a little daft but when you make a 6 button stick for CPS2 Street Fighter games your top row consist of A, B and C from the Jamma harness. And the bottom row are Light Kick, Medium Kick and Heavy Kick which come straight from the CPS2 kick harness. Neo Geo MVS uses button D from the Jamma Harness. So when I made my second arcade stick I made it have 7 buttons so that it had D on there as well.

The problem with the arcade machine is that the control panel has very limited space but I still wanted to be able to play Neo Geo MVS games on it. So I decided to see if I could wire up a switch so that I could convert button 6 to either by Heavy Kick or Neo Geo Button D.

Here you can see the Conversion Switch held in place via Cable ties mounted on my new bases.

The center of the Double Pole Double Throw switch leads to button 6. The left hand tab comes straight from the kick harness and the right hand tab comes from button D on the jamma harness. So if you flick the switch over to the left your hooked up for CPS2 games, and if you flick it to the right you have button D for Neo Geo games. :-D Im really pleased that such a simple switch works a treat! Probably very simple to most people that mess about with electronics or wiring stuff up but being new to this I was quite proud that it worked. woop!

Here you can see the finished control panel all working with the glass window in place. I've got Samurai Shodown running in the machine using my Neo Geo MVS 1F board.

For some reason when the Neo Geo is running in the machine the TV is keeping the channel panel up in the top right corner of the screen. Im a little unsure why its doing this as it doesn't do it on normal Jamma games. I'm pretty confident that when I get hold of the remote for the TV I can get that to turn off though so it's not obscuring so much of the screen.

And as a last little picture, here is how the CPS2 cartridges sit in the bottom of the machine. You can see how the Edge connector is in the back and how smaller boards will just end up hanging from it. Which isn't a good way to have them connected. So I'm going to be making a little box that sits in the bottom of the machine so it raises the boards up a bit.


So what's next for the machine? Im going to be cleaning up the glass window and trying to get the marquee light working. Tidy up the coin door a little bit and remount it to the front of the coin door area. Sort out the back panel of the machine. Repaint it or something as birds have been pooping on it a bit. Ugh!

Catch you on the next update :-)

Porl''

STREET FIGHTER 2 CHAMPION EDITION BOOTLEG *FIXED*

Hi everyone,

In my last post I was starting work on my Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition bootleg repair. I was tentatively dipping my toe into the world of arcade game repair. Well I started doing a lot of tracing tracks from the suspiciously warm chips in the middle of the board and reading up on the internet what the chips actually are.

I found that the really warm LS245's were tracing into or coming out of a bank of 6116 SRams. Thankfully I had a couple of 6116's in my stock of chips and stuff in my shed so I set about 'shotgunning' the board.

I ordered some socket strips from ebay which were really cool! I wanted to socket all the chips I was replacing because you can swap out the chips if they dont work right. All you have to do is pop the dodgy chip out with a screwdriver rather than having to cut the chip out each time and then desoldering the legs. Its not a really long process cutting them out but you don't really want to be doing it each time.

Well I traced across from one of the LS245's that seemed to have its top row of pins stuck low and it ran to one of the 6116's. I snipped him out and fitted a socket and switched it on to see what happened. Well all the foreground graphics dissappeared and all you could see was the backgrounds. Pretty cool!! I popped a replacement 6116 in and the foreground graphics came back with a slight bit of glitching gone. Stoked! It was really interesting to see what would happen without one of the chips in there.

I traced across from the other LS245 which had some pins stuck High and replaced the 6116 and the bouncing stage issue stopped!! Hot damn!!! :D It was such a cool feeling when I noticed the high score screen didn't bounce. I plugged the arcade stick and kick-harness in and played through the whole game and all bouncing stages were fixed!

The only thing left really was the KO kept glitching and moving and some of the maps on the player select were glitching so I had 4x 6116's left so I just replaced all the 6116's in the bank that were around the 2 issue ones.

And now I have this :



A pretty much glitch free SF2 : CE bootleg board! :D That I fixed myself! Something I didn't really think I could do at all. Soldering and wiring for Supergun's, arcade sticks and console mods/repairs aren't too worrying for me but attacking something full of chips was something else.

Stoked out is an understatement!! :D

Catch you later

Porl''

STREET FIGHTER 2 CHAMPION EDITION BOOTLEG

Hi everyone,

Sorry there's been a bit of a delay between posts on here. I've been meaning to make a post on the new Jamma Supergun I made last month but I've gotten caught up playing it haha, going to Revival and since then trying to get the nerve up to start trying to repair the Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition bootleg I got from there.

Basically I've had crap luck with bootleg boards so far and I now see why peeps in the forum I frequent steer clear of them really. The two I've had now have had weird problems where all the proper original games I have had no problems at all. Oh well.

I was really excited to get this game back from Revival and then during the next week spend an evening playing it to death with my mate Glynn. See if I could win a few matches against his 4/5 hit dragon punch combo's :-P

Well I get home and had about half an hour to check it before going out again. So I ran upstairs and excitedly hooked my Supergun up and fired the sucker up. Well, it runs but man is it dissappointing! The graphics are all glitched out!! Ryu's sprite is flickering around constantly on the screen and the KO sign keeps moving about. It run's but it looks poop!

I decided to make a video of it the next day and put it on Youtube and the forum I go on to see if anyone on there could point me in the right direction to diagnose the problem.

Here's the vid of the board in action.

Two comments I got on the video were to check the voltage on my internal power supply. I had the +5v set to run my CPS2 boards which is a little higher than normal, I think +5.2v. So I got my mini screwdriver out and started to slowly crank the +5v to see what happens.

Well when you get the voltage nearly up to +6v the sprite glitchiness starts to go, well Ryu's sprite goes anyway. That's good to know that it will get rid of the sprite glitch kind of but I really shouldn't have to crank the voltage up to that high. And it still hasn't fixed the problem really.

The next problem I noticed was on certain stages the screen seems to bounce about, like its losing sync. Its not rolling, just moving about up and down and slightly left and right. But if you go all the way over to the left on some of the 'bouncing' levels it stops moving and plays as it should. Very weird!!

I've started trying to play through the game and through the bouncing to see which stages are fine, some are, and which bounce. Its got me wondering if its one of the Mask Roms which holds the game information is slightly 'bad' or something. Maybe one of the Mask Roms holds 7 stages and another Rom holds the other 7? Or it could be bad Ram that the rom's pump the stage information into? Like one or two Ram chips hold 7 of the stages and one or two other roms hold the other 7? Its the next route to check really.

I have noticed that one of the Mask Rom sockets is wonkily soldered in so Im going to replace that to see if it helps at all.

Another issue the game had, which was a very minor one, was that player one had no heavy punch. Player 2 was fine. So I started looking around the edge connector and tracing back from the player one A button connector into the board. The trace seemed to come into a small bank of 3 LS245's not far from the edge, and one of them was socketed which makes me think its been repaired in the past. So I switched that socketed chip out for one of the LS245's I had but it didn't change anything. So I re-traced and then cut out and socketed the 3rd in the bank. Without the chip player two has no movement or punches. So I put a new chip in and he worked again. Well, there's only one chip left in that bank, number 2. So I snipped him out and player one had no movement or punches. Popped a new socket in there and new chip and BINGO! Player one has all his punches now! A small victory!! The first bit of game repair I've done, albeit a very minor one. It's a good sign though that I might be able to get to the bottom of the graphical issue.

I also made up a quick CPS1 kick harness from an old sega megadrive pad's connector and an old header connector from a digital tv box I salvaged for parts. Worked first time which I was rather surprised at haha and all kicks work on both players! :D

So the next steps for this repair is to start using my Logic Probe a little more and get to grips with using it and understanding how it works. The datasheets for TTL chips on these boards are COMPLICATED!!! haha. But Im sure I can learn how to read them.

Im going to keep 'shotgunning' the board and see how I go. Its all experience in messing around in this hobby anyway. And its interesting seeing what happens when you take a chip away and see what's changed. :-)

Right, this was just a quick update really as it's been a while because I've had my head down. I'll try to get a load of photos of my new Supergun and make a post on that as Im really really pleased and proud of how its turned out. It's a 100% nicer than my first Supergun.

Anyway, catch you later

Porl''