Choplifter PCB

ArcadEd

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When I got the cabinet only the monitor came on. Replaced the power supply and the game would post, IC Check past, did it's song and dance and just as the game would normally boot to the title screen I would just get a black screen.

I pulled the board and all the roms and one rom tested bad so I erased and reburned it and it tested fine in MAME.

When I put the board back in, I get nothing on the screen. No post, no test pattern, test mode doesn't come up either. The red light on the PCB comes on and the voltage is good.

I double checked all the Roms I pulled to make sure pins were ok and they were all back in right. Everything seems to check out.

Any ideas?
 
When I got the cabinet only the monitor came on. Replaced the power supply and the game would post, IC Check past, did it's song and dance and just as the game would normally boot to the title screen I would just get a black screen.

I pulled the board and all the roms and one rom tested bad so I erased and reburned it and it tested fine in MAME.

When I put the board back in, I get nothing on the screen. No post, no test pattern, test mode doesn't come up either. The red light on the PCB comes on and the voltage is good.

I double checked all the Roms I pulled to make sure pins were ok and they were all back in right. Everything seems to check out.

Any ideas?

addressing chips or ram are some common criminals. I would tend to lean towards ram it is easy to check.
 
A lot of these Sega system 8 games had protection in the form of security processors (instead of stock Z80s) and different MAME rom sets. I would read some of the other EPROMS to confirm that you burned the correct chip for the set you have on the board. Failing that, I would just erase and re-program them with an unprotected set. This got my Wonderboy booting and playing at least (though with bad colors, so something else is wrong).
 
How would I go about finding the unprotected roms? Does seem fishy that the problem got worse after simply burning one new rom.

Never mind, it's clearly labeled in MAME. I'll give that a shot, thanks.
 
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OK, so I burned the 3 unprotected ROMs and now I get it back to booting up, but I still have the same original problem.

Does the post pattern boot, IC Check is ok and I can get into the test menu.

Once the boot process finishes, I just get a blank screen, no title screen.

Back to Ram?
 
choplifter is very picky about its volage. So you might want to try going up or down a bit. Try moving it .05 and se if it makes a difference..

I think I have a bad audio choplifter board.. Slight chance I have a working one.
 
Thanks, testing at the board I tried.
5.00v
5.04v
5.10v
5.16v
5.20v

Same issue with each.
 
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Ahh, been down this road before with little luck.

I'll just see if there is anyone on here that repairs them, or has a working one and would trade out or something.

Thanks guys.
 
I did swap out z80s just to see. Same things.

Question, I can completely pull the Z80 that's up by the heatsink (near the volume pot) and get the same results. Is that Z80 only used for sound?
 
OK, so I got a second board off Ebay, listed as untested.

I fired it up and it does the exact same thing. All of the boot sequence happens, as soon it should show the title screen, I just get a blank screen.

Seems odd to have the exact same problem on 2 pcbs, but I guess it's possible if this is a common Choplifter issue. Is it?
 
Don't know if you tried this or not, but a while back I had two Choplifter PCB's. Both worked - but one would only give a good picture with negative sync, and one would only give a good picture with positive sync. i couldn't see anything different between them, but that's the way it was. I labeled them accordingly, then kept one and gave the other to a buddy...
 
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