Got my Sinistar, but......

skramarck

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Found a pseudo functioning Sinistar at a great price today. Symptoms were that it powered up with ROM errors, but the ship was unresponsive until it warmed up. After it warmed up, the ship would work for a moment and then fly off into outerspace.

Upon bringing home and inspecting, I've noticed that the ROM error code switched every time it was powered on. Furthermore, by having someone manipulate the 40 pin ribbon cable, the game would reset and then when it came back, the ship was fine. I've determined that I will replace the 40 pin and see if that permanently fixes the ROM and ship issues.

My question for the board is that while I am playing the game (once the ribbon cable is manipulated), Sinistar's speech is a little jacked up. He will say things like Run, live instead of Run,coward and will randomly scream in the middle of sentences, etc. He isn't speaking as the Sinigod intended. Could this be related to the ribbon cable to the ROM board or am I possibly looking at two separate issues.

All in all, I am happy to get a pretty nice looking Sinistar that almost works for the price that I did....just trying to get it across the finish line to fully functioning status.

Steve
 
I attempted this earlier and it didn't seem to make a difference. I have ordered a new cable. I suppose it could be a bad solder point on one of the boards too?

Would a ribbon cable issue cause jacked up Sinistar speech?

thanks for the advice. I'm just glad that at the moment, the game is playing (albeit with the speech issues) When I obtained it earlier, it would not play
 
Final verdict on my Sinistar.....There were two issues going on....both have been fixed (at least for now)

Issue 1- The gameplay (space ship flying off the screen...not firing, etc) was caused by a bad ribbon cable between the main board and the ROM board. I hit it with some contact cleaner, no improvement. I was then able to manipulate the cable in such a way that it made the proper contact and worked. That is the status now. I have a new cable on order with Bob Roberts and will make that changeover the next time the game shows errors.

Issue 2- Unbeknownst to me, the previous owner had removed the 4 speech ROMS I guess. He then had put two of them in the wrong spots which caused Sinistar to string together his words and sentences in a drunken manner (fun to hear but not correct). This was harder to troubleshoot because the labels had been removed from two chips. Luckily, there was a partial serial number on the remaining part of the label of one of the chips that had lost its labels. From here, we traced pins to chips and determined that two had been switched. Re positioned these and Sinistar was sober again.

Total cost to fix a $200 Sinistar.... Zero dollars and Zero cents...just a lot of patience and some good guidance from this forum (thanks Yellowdog) and my electrical engineer expert coworker.

Very pleased to have gotten one of my grails so cheaply and to have it working in time for the kids to enjoy over the holidays.


I HUNGER!
 
That's very cool. Sinistar has eluded me so far but it's one of those I remember from back in the day that I'd love to own someday. The special memories were the cockpit variety but I don't have room for one of those anyway but one day I'd like to get an upright. Nice job!
 
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