Space Invaders - need roms (or opinions)

orion3311

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I have a Space Invaders Deluxe board with bad roms. The roms are in bad physical shape - 2 of them have broken legs and otherwise the legs are pretty corroded/bad. I pulled all the roms and it appears to have a good test pattern. Is it worth spending the $ for a new set of roms or should I find someone with a set to test first?

I may try repairing the two bad chips - I did test with resistor legs just leaned up against the bad legs but I should have cleaned them better first. All the roms that were in one piece have been cleaned up.
 
I have a Space Invaders Deluxe board with bad roms. The roms are in bad physical shape - 2 of them have broken legs and otherwise the legs are pretty corroded/bad. I pulled all the roms and it appears to have a good test pattern. Is it worth spending the $ for a new set of roms or should I find someone with a set to test first?

I may try repairing the two bad chips - I did test with resistor legs just leaned up against the bad legs but I should have cleaned them better first. All the roms that were in one piece have been cleaned up.

Unless there's some reason (super expensive parts), just get new ROMs. You don't EVER want to fool around with the ROMs being flaky - the things that could do would be very hard to debug.

If you decided you DO want to repair what you've got, I recommend getting some machine-pin sockets and soldering the ROM chip to the top of the socket. Then you can plug the assembly in anywhere that the ROM used to go, with no modifications to the PCBs.

Obviously you'd only do that trick if the sockets cost less than a new set of ROMs.
 
I have a Space Invaders Deluxe board with bad roms. The roms are in bad physical shape - 2 of them have broken legs and otherwise the legs are pretty corroded/bad. I pulled all the roms and it appears to have a good test pattern. Is it worth spending the $ for a new set of roms or should I find someone with a set to test first?

I may try repairing the two bad chips - I did test with resistor legs just leaned up against the bad legs but I should have cleaned them better first. All the roms that were in one piece have been cleaned up.

I single ROM mod all midway 8080 boards I work on, as well as replacing the 8080 socket and the socket used by the single ROM... just not worth chasing down phantom issues caused by bad ROMs & sockets.
 
That socket idea is pretty good - I really just want to see if I can get what I have working before I dump any more $$ into it - this is one of those "parts now game later" deals, and it gave me something to tinker with at home while I was snowed in.

Originally I saw the mutigame kit at Mikes Arcade but at $90 its a bit steep - then I did some more searching and found it at Arcadeshop for $60, even so I didn't want to spend $60 on something that needs ram chips and whatever else. The multigame kit uses only the CPU socket so that eliminates all the rom sockets altogether.

Thanks for the help guys!
 
A little more than 2 months later...and now that I actually own a working cab...I actually got this board working! Replaced the CPU socket and so far socket H. Burned a 2716 test eprom and put in socket H. Fired it up and got an almost all white screen with a black box and what sort of appeared to be a blocky letter A. Assuming its the test rom trying to tell me a ram is bad, I took a ram chip and started piggy backing each chip. Got to chip H13 and it seemed to make a big difference, so I reseated it again for a solid connection, and rebooted. Screen turned all white, then the test rom screen came up! Success!!! (So far).

Incidentally, the board originally had 9316 roms on it, S2 is jumpered to ground, and nothing else was done to make the 2716 work.

Now some of the sounds seem to work but audio sounds really quiet and bad, like a lot of AC is getting through. Checked V.audio from power supply and it only has 3 volts. Hrmm. Went to desolder one of the diodes on the corner of the power supply as they weren't reading right, and it instantly broke in half. I guess I found the problem there.

(Incidentally this isn't the same power supply I mentioned in another post with burnt diodes, this is a cleaner one I picked up at the Allentown show).
 
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