Paperboy video problems and 6502 communication failure

baritonomarc

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Paperboy video problems and 6502 communication failure

Hi all,

i am trying to have my paperboy cabinet running, but the PCB has (various) problems.

Consider that i burned new ROMs using 27128 and 27256 EPROMs paying attention to the due doubling of the 16K byte MAME images when dealing with 27256.

First of all, i have graphic issues: in game mode the monitor is white, and the game doesn't start. When the self test is performed i have garbage in all the tests, but the alphanumerics are ok.

Second, during the test, the first problem reported is a "6502 communication error" ... the processor should be ok because i have a spare one and i had the same problem... what could it be? Bad soldering?

In addition, i have the suspect that the slapstic could be bad... how to be sure of it? I have no spare slaptics for paperboy...

thanks in advance, very appreciated :)
 
Made various testing these days and i solved the communication problem by substituting the 1A, 1B and 1C 6116 RAMs on the CPU board.

For what concerns the garbaged images, i will check my own burned ROM in the next days... could someone confirm that MAME ROMs are good dumps for Paperboy? Thanks :)
 
Made various testing these days and i solved the communication problem by substituting the 1A, 1B and 1C 6116 RAMs on the CPU board.

For what concerns the garbaged images, i will check my own burned ROM in the next days... could someone confirm that MAME ROMs are good dumps for Paperboy? Thanks :)

If I recall correctly I burned a set of paperboy roms from mame and they worked fine. It was a while back but im sure I pulled them from mame.
 
You might have already covered this but have you checked the voltages? The double board sets have a power connector on both boards even tho the power rails cross the boards. I fixed a mates Championship sprint at the weekend that was going odd stuff due to the fact the lower boards power feed connector was so corroded it was basically useless. As a result he had 5V on the top board, which faded to 4.3 at the lower reaches of the lower boards. Once the connector was cleaned up it had 5V everywhere, not only did the game then run again, but all the graphics glitches he had before it finally failed had vanished.
 
Thanks for the advice, the voltage was the first thing i checked and it's good as in the CPU board as in the video board. I will check it again, anyhow ;)

Just to see if my MAME dumps are good, i made a check to a set of masked ROMs from another spare paperboy PCB set i have. I noticed that the dumps are ok and that my board has some rev 2 and rev 3 roms on the CPU board. This was surely something i made wrong since i burned all my roms with rev 1 images.

One thing i cannot figure out: i correctly read the 23256 masked roms as 27256 (setting the lowest voltage, 12.7 IIRC), but i cannot read 23128 masked roms as 27128... what's wrong with this?

thanks :)
 
The spring finally is back and the temperature is perfect to proceed with my paperboy resto :)

Things done so far:

- reseated all the RAMs
- replaced all the ROMs with fresh images
- rebuild the A/R III by substituting all the caps and transistors/voltage regulators (with the exception of the 2 audio amplifiers TDA2030)

I now have:

-5V rock solid everywhere in both the PCBs (video and CPU)
-no sound (but this problem is not the one i wanna solve first)
-garbaged image... damn...

For what concern the garbage i can correctly see only some object (i.e. the face of the paperboy and alfanumerics)

i am now going to substitute all the capacitors in both the video and CPU board, reflowing the pins of all the connectors and going to clean the connectors themself with a little gritting... and crossing my finghers

in the meantime, even if RAMs test passes, i wanna buy some new 6116... could someone link the correct datasheet and, eventually, some good substitute for those? I wanna buy them from a local dealer if possible, but i am sure that with the right datasheet the dealer will be more confident in what to suggest me to buy

Thanks!!
 
Dont go reflowing solder joints just in case, you may well introduce new faults in the process. You likely have a TTL fault which you will never find without proper test tools.

As for the sound fault, the 1st thing I would try would be to replace the 6502 CPU, the number of devices I have found with dead 6502s is crazy, including Atari arcade board sets.
 
As for the sound fault, the 1st thing I would try would be to replace the 6502 CPU, the number of devices I have found with dead 6502s is crazy, including Atari arcade board sets.

Interesting. I have a Championship Sprint PCB here around and will try to swap the CPUs. Eventually i will remove, if socketed, the one from my NES ;)

For what concerns the garbage, i have a logic probe to test TTL logic: where do you suggest to start my tests on the PCB? The idea is to start from the RAMs (i am still in the need for the correct datasheet), then?

thanks

EDIT: is the following datasheet correct?

http://www.datasheetarchive.com/pdf-datasheets/Datasheets-26/DSA-511179.html
 
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