Pac-Man / Ms. Pac-Man PCB Repairs - Just Shaking My Head
I picked-up a pile of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man boards recently from an Operator, who's tech described them as in "various states of not working." That is good and I am going to use that "various states of not working..." in the future.
Anyway, he was not kidding... I got them on the bench and found every board had issues, but a bunch of them were just silly...
- Mix-matched PROMs (Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and Ms. Pac Attack)
- TMM2016P RAM inserted in 5E and 5F (these were labeled as 5E and 5F)
- 2732 PROMs in 6E, 6F, 6H, and 6J
- Broken PROM legs (original and replacements!)
Within these boards are two different implementations of the Ms. Pac-Man hack to remove the Ms. Pac-Man aux (one of these boards is repaired, except for missing all of the moving sprites... still working on that...). This particular board has two 2532 EPROMs piggybacked at 6H and 6J, with a jumper wire to each from 7N, with another wire on the back connecting 7N to the Z80). It's a cleaner version of this hack compared to others I've seen.
Within some of the other boards, I found a very poorly re-installed 285 socket (it's so loose the 285 won't stay in if tapped or the Pac-Man board is turned at an angle) and numerous burned edge connectors. Also, ran across a board that had no sound after everything else was fixed. Turns out someone replaced the amp chip, but must have stopped half way through since some pins were soldered together where others weren't solder at all (fixing all of this restored sound).
I won't need all of these when done, so I will be putting them up for sale. Just wanted to share, so thanks for letting me ramble.
Scott C.
I picked-up a pile of Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man boards recently from an Operator, who's tech described them as in "various states of not working." That is good and I am going to use that "various states of not working..." in the future.
Anyway, he was not kidding... I got them on the bench and found every board had issues, but a bunch of them were just silly...
- Mix-matched PROMs (Pac-Man, Ms. Pac-Man, and Ms. Pac Attack)
- TMM2016P RAM inserted in 5E and 5F (these were labeled as 5E and 5F)
- 2732 PROMs in 6E, 6F, 6H, and 6J
- Broken PROM legs (original and replacements!)
Within these boards are two different implementations of the Ms. Pac-Man hack to remove the Ms. Pac-Man aux (one of these boards is repaired, except for missing all of the moving sprites... still working on that...). This particular board has two 2532 EPROMs piggybacked at 6H and 6J, with a jumper wire to each from 7N, with another wire on the back connecting 7N to the Z80). It's a cleaner version of this hack compared to others I've seen.
Within some of the other boards, I found a very poorly re-installed 285 socket (it's so loose the 285 won't stay in if tapped or the Pac-Man board is turned at an angle) and numerous burned edge connectors. Also, ran across a board that had no sound after everything else was fixed. Turns out someone replaced the amp chip, but must have stopped half way through since some pins were soldered together where others weren't solder at all (fixing all of this restored sound).
I won't need all of these when done, so I will be putting them up for sale. Just wanted to share, so thanks for letting me ramble.
Scott C.
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