Joust crashes when too many enemies onscreen

check the roms. pull each one and make sure the legs are straight, no bends side to side. (as in, like the chip was pulled out one-sided) there's conditions where it won't throw errors, but they'll still be jacked up.

if you're lucky you'll get an entirely different symptom or the problem will go away. I haven't had time lately to look over schematics to see what's what.
 
So far the non-LS chips aren't improving the situation much.
I have noticed that sometimes when enemies are written to the wrong screen location, sometimes the game will actually correct itself a frame or two later and remove them.
Finding a different board is starting to sound like a good idea though.
 
So far the non-LS chips aren't improving the situation much.
I have noticed that sometimes when enemies are written to the wrong screen location, sometimes the game will actually correct itself a frame or two later and remove them.
Finding a different board is starting to sound like a good idea though.

If you've been dealing with it for this long and you are 1000% sure by swapping parts that the problem is somewhere on that ROM board then I would pick up a replacement and move on.

It'd be different if you where trying to keep a numbers matching set but that ship sailed before you inherited it.
 
So, followup post:

I got a different ROM board which plays perfectly, although when I booted it up tonight, it gave me the RAM error 21 message again. I reset it and got an All Systems Go instead. So I guess there's still something not quite perfect somewhere, but this ROM board is able to handle it a lot better. I haven't gotten a new ribbon cable for this one yet, but I was thinking of just re-crimping the existing one because the end that connects to the MPU board is cracked. I had a couple problems but I replaced the pin headers and squeezed the connector back together. I'm scared to just yank the cable off the old connector to put a new one on.
 
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