Konami Aliens - 2 versions?

srarcade80

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I have been trying to fix a graphics glitch on my Aliens board. In test mode, ROMs J8, K8, J13, K13 are all marked bad. So I look at the board to inspect and wow, they're not there. Now this is really strange because the game works and plays fine, it just has some lines in the background graphics.

So looking at other boards on the internet, there are ROMs present in J2, K2, J8, K8, J13, K13, J19 and K19 where on my board, they are all missing.

Instead, this board also has a bottom ROM board plugged in where all the pictures on the internet show a single board. The bottom ROM board has 28 ROMs present on it (ROM Board MAX96M) So is this a different version? It has an official Konami sticker on it and looks legit. I'm a bit confused now how to troubleshoot my bad ROM check sums with so many on here.

IMAG1136.jpg


IMAG1137.jpg


Another Aliens board (not mine) shown as a single board:
86_1_fs_pb.jpg
 
Looks like this version isn't dumped to MAME.
Clean and reseat the two layers and see if it helps.
If that doesn't work I would probe the FuShitsu LS245
bus transcievers. I have noticed that these things will often
have the whole A bus or B bus stuck.
 
Looks like this version isn't dumped to MAME.
Clean and reseat the two layers and see if it helps.
If that doesn't work I would probe the FuShitsu LS245
bus transcievers. I have noticed that these things will often
have the whole A bus or B bus stuck.

Thanks, I'll give it a whirl. Doesn't look connection related, boards in good nic only one small scratch that I fixed, checked for bent pins, did some pushing/flexing , re-connecting between boards, can't make the lines jump or change by handling it so its probably a LS stuck.
 
I found one of the bus line outputs on LS245 on K7 was stuck high. I don't have a spare but that's probably the issue since all the other lines are working fine. I'll try to get one tomorrow to see if that fixes the issue.

Another fun fact though- if you run the game without the ROM board attached, it still powers up, plays music and coins up and plays blind. The screen is white with no graphics or sound effects. I used this to isolate my issue to the ROM board which is fairly simple in design, it had to be the buffer having a problem which is a slew of LS245s.
 
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