Namco Starblade

Kaizen

Active member

Donor 2015
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Location
Yeronga, QLD, Australia
I picked this up on the weekend.
A guy had a Bobcat with a leaking hydraulic ram and agreed to give it to me in exchange for repairing it for him, delivery included.

Pics are from where it was stored...

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Once I got this behemoth home I set about stripping it down to get it into the garage.
It had sit for seven years when removed from site at Mooloolaba Wharf.

Some before pics...

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It was given a quick vacuum and what I couldn't vacuum was blown out with compressed air.
The outer plastics were given a wipe down with mild detergent on a rag and the domed screen was removed and given a hose down.

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There was a heap of mud wasp nests and a dead rat.

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The seat cleaned up okay and is in fair condition, no rips but the base has been retrimmed, it should be the same color as the backrest.

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The top section including the MS8-25 monitor was removed.

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A friend came over to give me a hand to get it into the garage but it was too heavy to lift high enough to get sufficient tilt to get the highest part under the roller door then he suggested that the cab can split in two by undoing the four bolts on either side of the base section. That worked and we managed to get it into the garage.

While the two steel posts were off I gave them a light sand and the surface rust came straight off.

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I gave them a quick coat of silver paint to prevent them rusting again.

The I/O board has track rot.

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I'll see if I can repair it with Kynar trace wire otherwise I'll try to source one and failing that I could always design and fabricate one myself.

I'm yet to pull the PCB out of it's cage and inspect it, the monitor is untested at this stage and one of the AC cables had been chewed through by a rat so that will need to be fixed first before powering the cab up.
 
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Not very common but there are a few about in each state.
I'll get the PCB out of its cage when I get home from later today and inspect it, fingers crossed it in okay condition.
 
I cracked open the PCB cage and pulled the top board out.
Fortunately there were no signs of track rot so with a bit of luck it may still fire up.
The end plate and monitor shield got a quick coat of paint.

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The MS8 chassis has had all of the adjuster pot cables chewed off and a number of other wires were munched on but no other visible signs of damage.

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I gave it a blow out with compressed air.

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I then set about repairing the wiring on the chassis, the connectors for the adjustment board were too hard to repair so I removed the headers altogether and soldered new wires in place.

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Starblade is ready for combat!!

Well not really, plenty more work to do but the monitor and PCB are working.
Audio is good and it credits up and starts a game and the LHS strobe is working.
There's no input on the Y axis and the fire buttons dont work but that may come down to the I/O filter board which hasn't been repaired yet.
19 hours worth of work in two days has payed off and I couldn't be happier with where it's currently at.

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https://youtu.be/sSSRH379Q44
 
Wow, this was one of my favorites back in the day. I played it at Flippers, in West Miami, Kendall, Florida back in the 90s. The base and feeling of immersion in the sound was amazing. You have the fresnel lens which is a big part of the experience.

Best of luck getting it working 100%, you've made great progress so far.
 
Starblade is ready for combat!!

Well not really, plenty more work to do but the monitor and PCB are working.
Audio is good and it credits up and starts a game and the LHS strobe is working.
There's no input on the Y axis and the fire buttons dont work but that may come down to the I/O filter board which hasn't been repaired yet.
19 hours worth of work in two days has payed off and I couldn't be happier with where it's currently at.




https://youtu.be/sSSRH379Q44


That's a beastly amount of work in two days! It's shaping up nicely.

I think I'm going to have to at least rebuild the monitor chassis that's been sitting on my soldering workbench for a week just to not feel lazy in comparison.
 
The Dream Machine arcade at the Lincoln Mall in RI had one for a bit back back in the 80's, they had a surprising number of extremely rare games go through that place, I managed to play it through to the end with a heavy investment in coins.
 
I remember vividly staring through the window of our local arcade day after day after school. We couldn't get in (as minors aren't allowed in arcades in Germany) but we could see the attract screen of Starblade running through the window and it was absolutely mindblowing! It was 1991 and the coolest graphics we knew were on our Nintendo Entertainment Systems at home. :D
Seeing Starblade was like a fucking timetravel to the year 2000! Or even 20000! :D
 
A bit more work done today, I repaired another eight cables that had been munched through, this time for the controls and now have the Y-Axis working and the four fire buttons have turned out to all be faulty but the wiring is now good and they work when manually shorted across and the lamp for the start button now works.

The game board has some issues, it's missing the 'STARBLADE' title and the objects are missing but you can see the explosions when you fire randomly around the centre of the the screen.
One of the strobes is a bit dim so I'll have to check out what's going on there.
I'm not sure if it had a vibration motor under the seat but when it's in test mode there's nothing happening when selected.
 
The six wires going to the seat for the two speakers and vibration motor were also completely chewed through.
I've repaired them and now have all four speakers working as well as the shaker motor which I've tested in game and works great.

I thought I'd have a go at repairing this PCB stack before trying to source another.
In order to be able to work on the game board I decided to make up some extension cables to allow me to have access to the top of an individual layer outside of the metal cage.

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This way I can snoop around the board with a logic probe and hopefully find where the fault is and determine whether I need to purchase another PCB or just replace a logic chip, RAM or reflow one of the SMD chips etc. (I believe these boards also have issues with broken vias).
I've desoldered and removed four 100 pin headers from a dead Jaleco Big Run PCB.

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I'm 1/2 way through joining the 200 cables to the two sets of headers, one down and one to go.

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Extension harnesses completed...

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I've had a look around the CPU board and have found no activity coming out of the custom chip '139', when I probe the M5M5179P-45 SRAM connected to it there is nothing happening at the I/O pins or the Address inputs. The row at the top of the custom '139' has activity on all pins and I've confirmed the Vcc and GND are connected to it.

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Either the 139 Custom is dead or whatever controls it is faulty.

From MAME System 22 driver: Namco custom 139 Serial Controller Interface IC (QFP64). NOTE! On some PCB's this chip has been replaced by a custom C422 chip, though the PCB number is the same which means probably the function of this chip matches 139.


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I had a quick look on Ebay and seeing as the cab only owes me AU$20 so far I thought it was worth taking a punt that the Custom '139' is faulty and found a Namco System Super22 Cyber Cycles PCB stack for AU$80 delivered.

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It'll take a week or so to arrive and I'll have to buy myself a Hot Air Rework station to swap it out but it will be worth it if it gets the game up and running.
 

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Just found this...
System 2 CPU board is similar to System 21.

http://manualzz.com/doc/34734426/namco-system-ii-circuit-schematic-rev.06

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I'll go back and map out exactly what activity is happening at each pin on the custom.
As mentioned earlier, either custom is dead or what's controlling it is at fault but which is it?
Are there any experts or people with experience in this area that can give some input?
What I need is to know what inputs will stop the custom from working altogether.
I have no experience in this area and am learning as I go.

EDIT:
Here's whats happening at the custom.

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