Black Widow help - garbage on screen

jehuie

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Here's a pic of what the screen looks like. It's repeatable and always looks the same. When I first power on the game I get no image at all and player 1 & 2 buttons are dark. When I press the reset game the buttons start to flash fairly quickly but still nothing on the screen. Then if I press one of them, I get this image for a while and then it changes and just shows a dollar sign ($) all alone on the screen.

I'm guessing it's trying to tell me that it will cost money to fix it. :)

Any tips on where to go with this one?
 

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Oh, and what I have done so far is check the +5...it's good. And I went and pulled all the roms and other socketed chips. Some of them had the black gunk buildup on the legs. Not terrible but a couple could have been problematic. I cleaned them off with Tarn-X and they look nice now. Put it all back together and it's still doing the same thing.

Also, when I flip the switch to test mode, I get a very fast snippet of the cross-hatch screen. But it doesn't finish drawing it....I get a portion of it and it goes away. And then flashes up again and repeats.

Oh, and I cleaned the edge connectors with an eraser and I put in a new "big blue" just for good measure.
 
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Well if the start buttons don't lock on and do flash when coined up and the spot killer stays off those are good signs. Does it play blind?? If so then you have a monitor issue most likely.
 
No, it doesn't play blind. The buttons are dark when it starts and don't start to flash until I press the reset button. Then they flash what I would call "too fast". Then I get the garbage on the screen. Then I get a dollar sign. None of that behavior is correct.

Also, it will make some random game sounds when I press buttons and move joysticks but it's clearly not playing anything close to properly. It seems like a board problem to me.

I just don't know what to check next.
 
Test mode shows the diamond pattern - or tries to. It draw a small portion of it, clears the screen and repeats over and over.
 
I haven't had a chance to check to see if it's watchdogging yet since I was off picking up the Pin-bot and all that. I'll check it out tomorrow hopefully. Is pulsing good or bad?
 
If it's pulsing that's bad. It means the code is not running properly. Could be something bad on the MPU side like bad rom, or bad dataline, or bad address line.
 
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