Pimpbot5000
Member
So I picked up an Omega Race in November and have been slowly coaxing it back to life. I knew this would be a huge project, but that's kind of what I was looking for... something to tinker with and learn how to troubleshoot. Plus it's a great game that I played a lot when I was a kid.
The motherboard had the typical acid damage:
I cleaned the board up as best as I could. The worst portion of acid damage had destroyed several circuit board traces:
I installed new sockets for the RAM chips and added jumpers to fix the circuit board traces. This is kind of ugly; it was my first time doing something like this.
After doing all of this, the board was still completely dead. At that point I noticed that the crystal was missing from the board. After replacing the crystal the board came back to life. I replaced a few more acid-damaged chips, added some more jumpers, and got the board to the point where I could coin it up and play it blind. This was huge for me; I think I probably picked one of the most troublesome games on which to learn PCB repair.
Unfortunately the self test is reporting RAMs 10 and 12 as bad, and I can't figure out why. I've checked all the address and data lines for continuity and I can see them pulsing with a logic probe. So I'm currently stuck on that problem.
The motherboard had the typical acid damage:
I cleaned the board up as best as I could. The worst portion of acid damage had destroyed several circuit board traces:
I installed new sockets for the RAM chips and added jumpers to fix the circuit board traces. This is kind of ugly; it was my first time doing something like this.
After doing all of this, the board was still completely dead. At that point I noticed that the crystal was missing from the board. After replacing the crystal the board came back to life. I replaced a few more acid-damaged chips, added some more jumpers, and got the board to the point where I could coin it up and play it blind. This was huge for me; I think I probably picked one of the most troublesome games on which to learn PCB repair.
Unfortunately the self test is reporting RAMs 10 and 12 as bad, and I can't figure out why. I've checked all the address and data lines for continuity and I can see them pulsing with a logic probe. So I'm currently stuck on that problem.

