Gorf troubles (wall of death)

With the nearly infinite amount of Gorf ROMs on the board stack, anyone have a clue at what I need to look at closer for this issue? After about 10 seconds there's just an unavoidable wall of death.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbunmaLX8n8&list=UU4svzv0wR7yJXaqetybB1Uw

I did look at the video with no sound @ public library and it looks to me like there is a connection problem with the rom chips. To find out just which one is the neat trick. Mame has some info as to what roms to what but I have limited success at finding the info. The first thing is to check the voltages, clean rom chip legs or re seat them, and connectors/clean re connect a time or two (the ones to the pcb and maybe clean with an eraser).

Is this a working board that went astray or one you got like this?
 
When I bought the game it behaved like this. It also likes to go into test mode and reset, but after I got that flakiness out of the way it behaved as it does in the video.
 
Looks like it's time for the test EPROM.

JD
 
did my ps last week courtesy bob...game was working before with no sound...cleaner now...doing sound board this week..wonder what trinkets bob will send to go with...keeping yall posted
 
The 2 ram boards, the pattern board and the cpu board are interchangable with a Wizard of Wor machine. I found out which ram board was bad by swapping them in my WOW one at a time. Same thing with the pattern board. Once I narrowed it down to the bad ram board I took a new ram chip and piggybacked it on top of each soldered ram chip one at a time and held them together with a piece of tape and then powered up the game. When you get to the bad ram chip you will see a change or fluctuation of the problem on the screen and that will tell you which ram chip is bad. Then it is just a matter of cutting the bad ram chip off the board, sucking the legs and solder out of the holes, adding new chip socket with a new ram chip and it should be fixed. Thats how I fixed my Gorf. Of course I also have a WOW so it makes it easy to troubleshoot both games. Even if you don't have both games if you suspect either ram boards are bad you can still use this piggybacking the ram chip trick to fix your Gorf or WOW. It will just take a little longer.
 
One more thing to mention. When you swap a bad ram board from a Gorf to a Wizard of Wor machine the bad ram board may give you a completely different symptom on the screen when you switch it in a different game. My Gorf was showing a screen problem much like yours was and also the players ship exploded right away without anything hitting it. When I swapped the bad ram board into my WOW the screen picture was alright but now the players space man was invincible and not affected by the aliens laser beams. Weird, but this was enough for me to say, yup, this is the bad ram board.
 
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