Did I Just Buy a Cool Paperweight?

ThunderBunny

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So I bought a dead Lethal Enforcers board off of FleaBay. Haven't plugged it in but description was a blank screen. After looking over the board I saw the obvious flaw. One of the CPU's had about 3 or 4 legs broken off. Is it possible to find one of those and is it possible to actually replace it? Looks like it would be tedious work if it's possible.
 
I don't know how good of a paperweight that would be - I mean, it's kinda pointy, and a bit too big. Might I suggest something a bit smaller, like an ARII?

;)

Post a good picture of the damage. It *is* possible to repair broken legs on chips. Or, you can replace it, depending on what kind of chip it is. I don't remember what CPU that game uses, or what it looks like.

-Ian
 
I think you're right about the paperweight idea. Maybe I'll do the wall art thing everybody was talking about. lol.

The chip is a Konami 054156 9246 z30. There's about a thousand legs on it that are soldered not socketed. Can't get a pic now but I will when I get a chance. It looks like the legs were ripped out of the chip itself, so I don't know about repairing the legs. It's really tight quarters.
 
The die in any of those chips is right in the center, so the plastic package is mostly "legs". It's possible to grind away the edge of the chip package to get at the conductors further inside, and solder wires to it. You need a steady hand, a little bitty dremel bit and a lot of patience, but it is doable.

-Ian
 
Its not easy to break the legs off a soldered in chip. Check for other damage to the board. Like broken off components and even hairline cracks.
 
Here is a pic of the broken legs, after I cleared a spot to get to them. The first 3 or 4 were completely ripped off and the other 2 were ripped off the board but still attached. Just looks like something got smashed into it. It appears to be the only damage to the board or any other components.
 

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Unfortunately that chip is a Tilemap Generator, its a gfx chip, it is unlikely that it is stopping the board from running. You could probably take that chip clean off the board and the board would boot and run, you would just be missing lumps of the graphics.

What's more likely is you have a TTL fault somewhere on the board that is preventing the board from booting. Konami boards of this era are peppered with Fujitsu TTL chips and these are a very common cause of board failure. I would expect the board suffered another fault which demoted it to a scrap board and it got slung in a box with other scrap and suffered the damage to that chip.

However, Fujitsu TTL chips are easy to fault find as they tend to die by losing internal connections to their legs. If an output pin shows up as floating when using a logic probe you know that chips is bad. Input pins are less easy to spot as the signal is present on the external portion of the leg, it just doesnt connect internally. So you need to work out what the output shold be doing based on the inputs you can see. Not too dificult but a bit time consuming.

However, carry on fixing that tile map chip, I am fully prepared to eat my words if the board leaps into life when its fixed :)

If not then you need to start with the standard troubleshooting stuff listed in the "sticky" thread. But my money would be on the F chips near the 68000 CPU. Only the F TTLs seem to be flaky, the Fujitsu SRAMs are pretty robust.
 
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Somewhere I have one with a cracked hybrid... I'll see if I can dig it up.
 
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