Donkey Kong PCB issues - with video!

eightbitwhit

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Donor 2012, 2015
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Hey everyone,

Just fired up my DK (2-board stack) and I'm getting the following behavior. I'm going to pull the PCB and re-seat all of the socketed IC's but was curious if anyone had any input into what might be causing this.

Thanks!

 
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check for corrosion on all the socketed chips too. wanna say same thing happened on my 4 board and that's what it was.

did this game ever work? work with occasional lockups?
 
Game is watchdogging which indicates a problem on the CPU PCB with either the CPU, program ROMs or circuitry between the two. If reseating the CPU/ROMs doesn't solve the problem then you could probe the control and data signals to the ROMs to see if they are toggling at all. If any are stuck it might indicate if it's an address decoding or datapath problem.
 
check for corrosion on all the socketed chips too. wanna say same thing happened on my 4 board and that's what it was.

did this game ever work? work with occasional lockups?

I'll check for corrosion and pop everything socketed out and inspect condition.

I'm not sure if this board stack ever worked or not... I bought it supposedly working, but it's somewhere between DOA and DK. ;)
 
Game is watchdogging which indicates a problem on the CPU PCB with either the CPU, program ROMs or circuitry between the two. If reseating the CPU/ROMs doesn't solve the problem then you could probe the control and data signals to the ROMs to see if they are toggling at all. If any are stuck it might indicate if it's an address decoding or datapath problem.

Thanks for the info. Do all Nintendo PCB's watchdog in this same manner?
 
Thanks for the info. Do all Nintendo PCB's watchdog in this same manner?

No. In fact even the same game type will watchdog differently depending on the issue. For example some DK's may reset when reaching a certain stage of the game, or when you coinup the game, or instantly (which is what your symptom is). Each situation is unique depending on where the CPU is getting lost with respect to the program execution.
 
No. In fact even the same game type will watchdog differently depending on the issue. For example some DK's may reset when reaching a certain stage of the game, or when you coinup the game, or instantly (which is what your symptom is). Each situation is unique depending on where the CPU is getting lost with respect to the program execution.

OK, thank you for the clarification. As you can likely tell, I'm new to board repair/troubleshooting and this is all pretty new to me. Just trying to learn my way around the common issues and fixes.
 
OK, thank you for the clarification. As you can likely tell, I'm new to board repair/troubleshooting and this is all pretty new to me. Just trying to learn my way around the common issues and fixes.

No problem at all. That's what this community is here for. ;)
 
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