Outrun paralax background rendering as text

FTGGaming

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First post - so if I am in the wrong place, please let me know.

I got a beat up Outrun in a package deal that was playing blind. I put a good K7000 monitor in it and it plays great.

The problem is that it is rendering the lower, furthest back parallax level as garbled text. For example, if you take the left path at the first fork, the background shows things like "Sega 1986" or the characters for entering in your initials but they are textured like they are the base of the mountains. I tried to capture some pics of it.

I did have to wiggle ic's, reseat all connectors, and flex the board because it first booted with thin white vertical lines all over the picture. This fixed 98% of the issues.

Those remaining issues are the text rendering in the background I mentioned above and the top 2 inches of the screen are a different shade of blue that the rest - this happens right above the hud at the top of the screen. I wonder if that is normal or not?

For the text in the background, I was wondering what ic's handle that portion of the background? I want to check those for bad traces and corrosion before doing anything else. If I can find my logic probe I will run that over them too.

Also is it bad for the game to play it like this? I don't want to play if it is going to do more damage.

Thanks in advance!

Drew
 

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This looks like an issue on the video board. I'd look into the built in test and see if any RAM or ROM (unlikely) is shown bad. Most likely a TTL issue. The schematics of the video board (page 1) show the tilemap generator section, I'd go on the area first. Of course, it will be difficult to diagnose because the boards are sandwiched together.

So, without any special equipment, most of you can do is verify ROMs, verify good voltage on the 5V line and run the memory test (and if you can burn ROMs, the expanded memory test here). If no errors are identified, I'd sent it in, Ken at irepairsega.com will fix this… (I don't repair those anymore). I do have a working board if you want to go that route though…

p
 
Thanks for this information. I don't have a rom burner (yet) so I can't burn the extended test. However the in game tests are returning good on everything that is tested.

I'll take a look at the schematics and the board and see if there is any obvious corrosion or messed up traces.

You are the second person to point me towards @irepairsega. If I can't see anything obvious I will have to consider either reaching out to him or your board. Would you take my board in as trade towards that if I went that route? I like the idea of having that PCM mod…which I know I can do either way.
 
Thanks for this information. I don't have a rom burner (yet) so I can't burn the extended test. However the in game tests are returning good on everything that is tested.

I'll take a look at the schematics and the board and see if there is any obvious corrosion or messed up traces.

You are the second person to point me towards @irepairsega. If I can't see anything obvious I will have to consider either reaching out to him or your board. Would you take my board in as trade towards that if I went that route? I like the idea of having that PCM mod…which I know I can do either way.
That sounds like a good plan, I can certainly do a trade in but would like to see some pics of the board first.

p
 
No problem. I understand. When I have it out tonight to look it over I'll make sure I get some good pics and send them your way for consideration.

Thanks again for all the help!
 
I went through and did what I could with the video board. I removed all the socketed ic's, took a fiberglass pen to all the legs, and wiped out the sockets with ipa.

There were two issues I found:

IC112 had been replaced at some point. I say this because two of the legs were shorted with solder.
IMG_2830.jpeg
I cleaned that up
IMG_2832.jpeg

Then on IC100, one of the legs was bent under the chip and not in the socket
IMG_2831.jpeg
So I carefully bent that back to true and ensured it seated properly.

I put everything back together and…

It still is not rendering that parallax baseline layer properly. It is still rendering that layer out of sync and textured text like in my photos above.

So back to square one. Would doing the same thing with the cpu board potentially make any impact? Unseating socketed ic's, cleaning the legs and socket, and reseating?
 
I went through and did what I could with the video board. I removed all the socketed ic's, took a fiberglass pen to all the legs, and wiped out the sockets with ipa.

There were two issues I found:

IC112 had been replaced at some point. I say this because two of the legs were shorted with solder.
View attachment 848443
I cleaned that up
View attachment 848444

Then on IC100, one of the legs was bent under the chip and not in the socket
View attachment 848445
So I carefully bent that back to true and ensured it seated properly.

I put everything back together and…

It still is not rendering that parallax baseline layer properly. It is still rendering that layer out of sync and textured text like in my photos above.

So back to square one. Would doing the same thing with the cpu board potentially make any impact? Unseating socketed ic's, cleaning the legs and socket, and reseating?
It's good that you find and remedy these, I am surprised about the soldered legs together on that IC, I would imagine you'd see some color issues…

1758376481375.png

It will not hurt to do the same process to the cpu board, I do this all the time as part of my repairs…

p
 
I went through and did what I could with the video board. I removed all the socketed ic's, took a fiberglass pen to all the legs, and wiped out the sockets with ipa.

There were two issues I found:

IC112 had been replaced at some point. I say this because two of the legs were shorted with solder.
View attachment 848443
I cleaned that up
View attachment 848444

Then on IC100, one of the legs was bent under the chip and not in the socket
View attachment 848445
So I carefully bent that back to true and ensured it seated properly.

I put everything back together and…

It still is not rendering that parallax baseline layer properly. It is still rendering that layer out of sync and textured text like in my photos above.

So back to square one. Would doing the same thing with the cpu board potentially make any impact? Unseating socketed ic's, cleaning the legs and socket, and reseating?
Good job in finding what you are finding! You've identified some clear problems.

Working on these boards is challenging - you kind of need to have a rig to separate the boards so you can probe the signal lines and see where the problem is.

If you don't have that capability, you'll be beating your head against the wall. Maybe it's time to send it out for repair, or start making a rig so you can separate the boards?
 
Good job in finding what you are finding! You've identified some clear problems.

Working on these boards is challenging - you kind of need to have a rig to separate the boards so you can probe the signal lines and see where the problem is.

If you don't have that capability, you'll be beating your head against the wall. Maybe it's time to send it out for repair, or start making a rig so you can separate the boards?
Yeah, I know there is only so much troubleshooting I can do with what I have. Repair is for sure the path I am heading towards one way or another.

But a test rig is also on my list of future projects so I can just take care of it myself.
 
Yeah, I know there is only so much troubleshooting I can do with what I have. Repair is for sure the path I am heading towards one way or another.

But a test rig is also on my list of future projects so I can just take care of it myself.
If you want to build one, go ahead. I think it's a great idea.

I have a lot of test equipment. I use it on occasion. It helps me a lot - you can see something and understand what is going on sometimes. Other times, not so much so.
 
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