Raiden DX PCB repair

opt2not

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Hey all,
I picked up a dead Raiden DX board on the cheap, with the hopes of seeing what I can do to get it working. Though I've repaired a couple boards in the past, I am by no means an expert, and those past repairs were simple stuff like failed audio circuits or faulty rom swaps.

Figured I should get a post up in case anyone wants to chime in onto what things I can look out for.
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The board was dead-dead, didn't power up at all, black screen, no audio etc... dead.
On top of that, it had evidence that the board was not well stored, but seemed to be sandwiched between other boards. Given the fact that there were scratches all over the place. Check out this cap!
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All the caps are like this. In my experience, most of the time capacitors are linked to the audio circuit, and seeing that these were all in the audio section of the board I left them alone till I can get this thing powered.

First things first: Clean the board, look for physical damage.
I took out my trusty magnifying glass and scanned through looking for any kind of blemishes I could find. Primarily looking for broken traces given the amount of scratches.
But the first, most obvious thing I noticed was one of the custom chips had a bunch of legs detached from the board!
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On top of that, one of the traces was ripped. I'm guessing something must have snagged on the legs and got yanked when the board was moved around.
I thought "well that must be the reason it doesn't power up".

So with a little hope, I soldered the legs back as best I could, continuity tested to make sure they were in fact connected and not connected to each-other, then plugged it in and voila! The game boots! I was ecstatic there is still some life left in this board! But there's no audio, and the sprites are crap.
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It seemed like the game was running properly in demo mode.
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So the next thing I looked at was the audio, 'cause I'd like to ascertain whether the game logic was indeed running properly, plus I've fixed audio sections on boards before so I was confident I could find something. Lo and behold I did. There was a tiny broken trace on the bottom side of the board that was linked to the audio section (sorry about the blurry pic, it's hard to get an up-close shot of something this small).
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I jumpered the connection as best I could (kinda shanty-like, but it works), powered it up again and the audio worked! Now I can audibly tell that the game logic is intact, I can start a game, select a mission and hear my ship fire, bomb, get destroyed...everything.

Power... check.
Game logic... check.
Audio... check.
Now the graphic problem...

So I get no ship, bullets, explosions, or title sprites at all. All that is displayed is the background sprites all messed up in colours. I thought there could be two possibilities, 1. sprite roms are bunk, 2. the video ram is crap.
At this point I took out my logic probe and started poking around the rams in the video section.
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Now I'm not too knowledgeable with logic probes, but what I found seemed to me that a couple of my rams had floating outputs (nether high nor low and not pulsing?). I connected my working Raiden II board to compare my findings in the video section (since the boards are practically the same hardware, I figured it should be similar in function), found out that 2 out of the 4 rams on my DX board seems suspicious.

This is where I think I need some input on what to look for. Is using a logic probe the best tool to ascertain the fault?

I went to my local electronics shop where I usually am able to find most components I run into on a board, hoping to just shotgun the rams, but they didn't have any of these in stock.

Does anyone know a source I can buy these from?

Any input you guys have would be much appreciated, I really hope I can bring this one back from the dead, its such a great game. Right now, it's on life-support!

ps. I've been referencing this thread a lot, since it's the only in-depth look at repairing this board that i could find on the net.
 
Mask roms and Sony CXK SRAMs are prime candidates, both with a high fail rate. Those SRAM chips havent been made since the mid 90s, they are 6116 SRAMs under Sonys name. You should be able to track them down by searching for 6116s. Beware that these are the 0.3" wide chips, they also come in 0.6" width packages which wont be much use to you.

6116
TMM2015/2016/2018
MCM2018
9116

All compatibles..
 
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Thanks for getting in on this thread Womble, your input is greatly appreciated! That repair post I linked of yours had a happy ending, I'm hoping I can follow suit!

I'm going to see if I can track down a couple 6116's.

Here are a few more details about the 2 RAM in question (pasted from my shmups forum post):

OE on one of the suspicious RAM is pulsing fast and neither in high or low. CS is the same.

The other one is low pulsing on OE, and low constant for CS. But I noticed a low tone fluttering pulse on I/O6 and I/O5, the other RAM aren't doing that. That is why I think this one is suspicious as well.
 
Mask roms and Sony CXK SRAMs are prime candidates, both with a high fail rate. Those SRAM chips havent been made since the mid 90s, they are 6116 SRAMs under Sonys name. You should be able to track them down by searching for 6116s. Beware that these are the 0.3" chips, they also come in 0.6" packages which wont be much use to you.

6116
TMM2015/2016/2018
MCM2018
9116

All compatibles..

+1
You really gotta watch them part numbers and package sizes. I have got some parts I can't really use 'cause I didn't watch them.

Looks like bit_slicer had some awhile back...

http://forums.arcade-museum.com/showthread.php?t=39582
 
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2018, 6116, cxk-5814, etc...

You can find the 2018-35 on junk CPS1 boards. They are used for color RAMs and should work fine for that board. I seriously doubt they really need 15ns RAMs.

RJ
 
I just repaired a DX last week and had the same graphic problems. Besides bent pins on the QFP nead the battery area there were a bunch of lifted pins on the QFP near the back edge. Reflowed the entire chip with new solder and the graphics cleared up.
 
SUCCESS!
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Ended up re-flowing the solder on a couple of those custom surface mount QFP's I mentioned earlier, plugged it back in and it came out perfect!
Checked the logic on those RAM I was worried about before, and they look all good now. Looks like I didn't need to swap out them after all. Good thing I didn't pull the trigger yet on a purchase.
I now have a fully working Raiden DX board! :applaud: :D All sprites are drawing properly, sound is working, coin up, buttons, everything!
I'm going smoke-test it a little while longer and see if there are any more quirks that'll show up.

Big thanks to XianXi, who pointed me to exactly what to look at, and everyone who put input in on this fix.

To recap:

Problem 1: Dead Board, didn't power up at all.
Solution: Big QFP near the edge connector (Red 2) had lifted pins off the board. Re-soldered them down and board powered up.

Problem 2: No sound
Solution: Found a broken trace in the audio circuit. Jumped the connection, audio now works.

Problem 3: Game logic works, but all sprites were missing and background sprites had completely bad colours displayed
Solution: Re-flowed the solder on one of the QFP handling video signals (Red 6 and Red 8)

Cheers all!
:cheers:
 
You'd be surprised at how many PCBs with surface mount chips I fix with simple reflowing of the chips. They get flexed and the pins go POP!

The worst offenders are those 1/2mm pitch legs found on chips such as the dual SH3 CPUs on the Sega ST-V boards, Seibu boards, etc.

RJ
 
Thanks guys. I had the board running for 6+ hours straight yesterday, and it didn't skip a beat. I should have it run a little longer than that, but I'm happy to say that this fix is solid!

You'd be surprised at how many PCBs with surface mount chips I fix with simple reflowing of the chips. They get flexed and the pins go POP!

The worst offenders are those 1/2mm pitch legs found on chips such as the dual SH3 CPUs on the Sega ST-V boards, Seibu boards, etc.

RJ
I'm definitely going to look out for this from now on. It's great to find a solution like this that doesn't require much effort to get working. Here's to hoping that most PCB fixes are this easy ;) :cheers:
 
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