Gorf Repair

jgeiger

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I have a really good condition Gorf cabinet that needs some repair work. The game powers up just fine and the screen looks good with the exception of some yellow lines across the screen. When the game plays theres no player on the screen but you can shoot but not move. The game is quickly over as you get blown up right away (it does show an explosion animation but not ship). The audio and speech is there but the speech is garbled.

I ran the test and the controls test out fine. Theres one X at the bottom of the test screen. I checked all the fuses and the voltage going in to the PCB chasis and they all seem fine. I also pulled all the cards out and reseated them. Looked them over and didnt really see anything noticeably wrong.

Ill post a video of the game play tomorrow but through I would see if anyone had any ideas on what to check next.

Thanks for any info.
 
Thanks, a couple of additional questions.

Are the video ram chips specific to this machine?

Who's a good source to order new ones from?

Should I replace them all or figure out which ones are actually bad?

Whats the process and what tools are used to test the individual ram chips or track down which ones are bad? (Ive been learning a lot and am able to fix a good number of things but dont have an electronics background)

Thanks again for any help.
 
Attached a couple of images of my screen. You can see the yellow lines across the display area.
 

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Gorf or wizard of wor ram cards will both work. P?robably a pain to track down exact rams causing the issue. The problem with gorf and wow is the cage. You really need to make a special harness so you can run the boards spread out on a bench. Most people won't go to that effort so with this type of board set it is best to have some working spares to swap around. Gorf and wow are a pita.
Bump. Any help would be appreciated.
 
Thanks for the info, thats good to know. I actually have a WOW on the way and will need to buy a board set for that. Saw a Gorf set as well. Wanted to see how much of pain it was going to be before I dropped the money.

Thanks again.
 
Thanks for the info, thats good to know. I actually have a WOW on the way and will need to buy a board set for that. Saw a Gorf set as well. Wanted to see how much of pain it was going to be before I dropped the money.

Thanks again.

The rams are easy to find... you can't swap out them out with newer RAMs though, since 4015/4027 latch their outputs and 4116/4164/41256 don't.
 
I ended up just getting a new boardset from QuarterArcade. Ill take everyones advice though and eventually fix the original one and use it as a backup. Heres a crappy picture of the game fired up. Thanks to everyone for the advice.
 

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I use D2104 on them just because I have plenty of them compared to the 4027.
You dont want to blindly replace ram on the board, will take alot of work. Mr Spaeth wrote a handy test rom that does a good job finding bad rams.
 
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