Ring King Not Booting

2HitWonder

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Looking for some help here. I just bought a Ring King PCB from Quartercade that was listed as tested and working. It was shipped to me and I am installing in my old Zaxxon cab. I definitely need to work on the monitor connections for my finicky k4600 to keep it from rolling and curling, but I will get to that later.

I got the harness wired up and fired it up the first time, and get a grid screen (see picture). I did get it to boot one time early on, but the image was faint and upside down and it would not do anything else including no sound. I have not been able to get it to boot since.

I later discovered that the pinout on arcade museum is incorrect in not listing a -5V connection. After reading the manual, I hooked up the -5V, but still am only getting the grid screen most of the time after a brief attempt at booting. The only times I can get it to not go grid screen it gives me "A5BD" alone on the screen, and upside down (see picture). Tried the PCB in another machine and got the same grid result.

I have checked my voltages on the PCB traces and they are right where they should be, so I am looking for suggestions as what to try next.
 

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Even if nobody has done much with Ring King, maybe someone knows about Data East PCBs? What the most common cause of not booting is?


Another screen that appears after a failed boot attempt. Also the screen will change sometimes if you leave it on for a while.

Ordered a logic probe and will try to poke around and see what I can find if nobody has any suggestions first.

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Have to talked to QuarterArcade about this?

I would check connections of any socketed chip. Pull them out, clean the legs with a rubber eraser (gently) and re-insert. If there are any interconnecting cables, I would remove and re-insert.

At least the Video circuit is working.

Paris
 
Have to talked to QuarterArcade about this?

I would check connections of any socketed chip. Pull them out, clean the legs with a rubber eraser (gently) and re-insert. If there are any interconnecting cables, I would remove and re-insert.

At least the Video circuit is working.

Paris

I have not contacted quarterarcade. Of the 3 or 4 PCB's out there for sale (working or not), this one was by far the most reasonable. I'll take their word that is was working when shipped and assume that something got messed up in transit. It has happened to me before on PCBs that were mailed.

I had already reseated all the socketed all the Rom chips. I did find one leg with some kind of white corrosion on it and the socket it was in. Cleaned it as best I could and reseated with no change.

I unplugged the ribbon cables on top so that I could examine the underside of the top board. I have not done anything with the bottom plugs, so I''ll have a look at them when I get home this evening.

Thanks!
 
Schematics do exist for this:



https://ia800209.us.archive.org/21/items/ArcadeGameManualRingking/ringking.pdf



What type of tools do you have at your disposal? A ROM burner (to verify the ROMs) and a logic probe would certainly help.



I have that same pdf copy of the manual (which is mostly schematics) and have ordered a logic probe.

This will obviously be my first attempt at testing chips, so I will have to stumble through it. Have done a ram swap to repair my Centipede, and replaced sound chips on Zaxxon, in addition to a bunch of monitor chassis repairs, so I am not totally green at this. The hard part for me will be finding the bad component(s)
 
Working!

I'll post this here to finish out this thread and for posterity's sake, being that there are very few Ring King PCB repair threads out there.

I received my first logic probe, and not really knowing what I was doing, I probed around the board looking for anything that seemed out of place. Was comparing similar chips to each other to see if they were reading the same. I stumbled across F14 and a few pins giving out some really sick sounding signals. I traced back up the circuit to the chip that fed into it (F13) and found the same pins giving off bad signals. I replaced the two chips (LS157 and LS257) last night and we have a booting game! Once I got the 157 off I could see rust under some of the legs and upon close inspection that whole section of the board seems to have some residue from what looks like sitting liquid in the past.

Anyways, happy to have it working and hopefully his will help someone in the future.

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