BACKGROUND
This Golden Axe PCB has always been like the classic 1964 childrens tale "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein (thanks wikipedia!). I bought it many years ago from ebay in piss poor shape. It taught me the ropes of board repair: replacing sockets, soldering EPROM legs when they broke, hunting down bad EPROMS, and CPU replacement. I enjoyed the game for many years. Recently I started raiding this set for parts to make other games from the same hardware platform work again. In the end this PCB set became nothing more than an incomplete set of EPROMS on a scrap piece of styrofoam. A lot like the stump in the above story.
Last night some parts came in for an unrelated project and I had enough spares to give this game a shot at running again on its own. I'll be rebuilding and repairing this using parts boards and whatever scrap I can find. I made very good progress last night, so time to share!
THE EPROM BOARD
This stripped, scrap board was given to me in a lot of other parts awhile ago. I rebuilt it during troubleshooting of my MVP boardset and I learned that it can run Golden Axe through some pictures online. I moved over every original EPROM I could and spent a lot of time with MAME sets reconstructing the other code. I programed the code to spare chips and had a heck of a time adding and getting the jumpers correct. It is not pretty, but it does work; major accomplishment!
The only thing it needs is a specialized socketed chip marked PLS153N. This may be the chip that holds this entire project up in the end, I still haven't tracked one down!
A picture of the populated board, notice the bad bend on the left. This is actually a crack in the board that I repaired:
THE MAIN BOARD
Not much to say on this yet, I have a source for the two missing PALS and I will be looking through my parts boards to find a 10Mhz 68000 CPU and a Z80 processor. This board will have a slight audio issue to work through after everything is populated again (I tried using this board before when I rebuilt my Shinobi PCB). This board has a lot of repair work done to it, but is complete aside from a heatsink and socketed chips. More will be added to this thread as progress is made and more parts come in!
A picture:
This Golden Axe PCB has always been like the classic 1964 childrens tale "The Giving Tree" by Shel Silverstein (thanks wikipedia!). I bought it many years ago from ebay in piss poor shape. It taught me the ropes of board repair: replacing sockets, soldering EPROM legs when they broke, hunting down bad EPROMS, and CPU replacement. I enjoyed the game for many years. Recently I started raiding this set for parts to make other games from the same hardware platform work again. In the end this PCB set became nothing more than an incomplete set of EPROMS on a scrap piece of styrofoam. A lot like the stump in the above story.
Last night some parts came in for an unrelated project and I had enough spares to give this game a shot at running again on its own. I'll be rebuilding and repairing this using parts boards and whatever scrap I can find. I made very good progress last night, so time to share!
THE EPROM BOARD
This stripped, scrap board was given to me in a lot of other parts awhile ago. I rebuilt it during troubleshooting of my MVP boardset and I learned that it can run Golden Axe through some pictures online. I moved over every original EPROM I could and spent a lot of time with MAME sets reconstructing the other code. I programed the code to spare chips and had a heck of a time adding and getting the jumpers correct. It is not pretty, but it does work; major accomplishment!
The only thing it needs is a specialized socketed chip marked PLS153N. This may be the chip that holds this entire project up in the end, I still haven't tracked one down!
A picture of the populated board, notice the bad bend on the left. This is actually a crack in the board that I repaired:
THE MAIN BOARD
Not much to say on this yet, I have a source for the two missing PALS and I will be looking through my parts boards to find a 10Mhz 68000 CPU and a Z80 processor. This board will have a slight audio issue to work through after everything is populated again (I tried using this board before when I rebuilt my Shinobi PCB). This board has a lot of repair work done to it, but is complete aside from a heatsink and socketed chips. More will be added to this thread as progress is made and more parts come in!
A picture:
Last edited:

