Splatterhouse repair log (long 'n wordy)‏

ifkz

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A couple months back, I found a stripped out Namco Splatterhouse board online and I purchase it. When I got it, the board was even worse off than I thought. It was stripped of all EPROMS, mask ROMS, three CPUs, and some hard to find pseudo SRAM chips. Whatever operator did this left the custom Namco chips, so the board still had a chance to live again.

Members here helped with the detective work. I found replacement 6809's from a scrapped out Double Dribble set, I ordered blank EPROMs online (and burned a set), and member THE COUNT sent me close up shots of his Splatterhouse pseudo SRAM chips so I could get what I needed.

At first power up, the game came up and was playable! I still had an issue to sort through, the sprites all had rapidly oscillating textures. I tried a couple things to track this down; the one that got me into the most trouble was flexing the board to see if this had an affect on the sprite issue. While I was doing this, the board stack separated when the game was on.

After sorting that out and powering up I had an odd error message about an EEPROM error. Research here lead me to member SOLDER who had helped with an identical issue back in 2009. The fix was to erase this chip at board location U1 so the self test could re-initialize the game and re-write the chip. It worked! Without his help, my board would be flat out dead. I also have ATARISCOTT to thank as he sold me an advanced enough EPROM programmer to handle this oddball chip.

While trying to figure out what had happened, I also found a bad EPROM which I erased and re-burned. The boardset is being held together with zip ties at the moment, I'll be on the lookout for screws and nuts next Home Depot trip.

A happy picture below.

THE END.

sh_working-1.jpg


P.S. Yes, I am missing the Xbox360 game but have the pre-order. I'll certainly be getting the game a bit later.
 
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Just when I got a need to play my game, it screwed up again...bad flickering sprites still. Now that my board was held together properly, I went back to flexing. I finally tracked it down, bad surface mount chip legs at A2 on the CPU board. Surface mount...I hate surface mount work! I got it done and the patient lived.

Strangely, I found a number of bad chips before I thought about flexing. I must have replaced half of them. I hope it is just dirty chips. They all verified okay, and it wasn't the same bad chips everytime. Humm, this story may not be entirely over. No other thing to do but play and see :) A major problem conquered.
 
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