Star Wars rebooting after VRAM replacement

Level42

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Recently my Star Wars cockpit performed beautifully all day during Eurocade.
I don't believe I had played it after Eurocade and powered it up today to check my work on a WG6100.
Apart from some other problems I noticed there were things happening that didn't seem to come from the monitor....

So, I hooked up the Amplifone inside the cockpit again and the attract mode was fine. However, as soon as I started a game the graphics started messing up, screen freezing and sometimes re-booting.

Now, being a SW veteran ( ;) ) those things happening didn't scare me because I've seen it before. These things happened whenever one of the VRAM chips had entered the land of the eternal bits....as a matter of fact I already have seen it happening twice but that _was_ a long time ago.
Anyway, in both cases, the self-test nicely indicated which VRAM was dead, I replaced it and it worked happily ever after.

Until today.

Of course I picked up my "SW spare parts bag" and took out another new VRAM and put it in the machine. Sure enough, test mode reported it was fine now, so I started a game. Ahhh, great I thought....no more graphics problems, I could play normally. However...when i blew up the deathstar the PCB rebooted.

Now, ever since....the machine reboots when I am hit by enemy fire but also when I hit one of the catwalks in the trench and also when blowing up the death star. It is not ALWYAS but pretty often.

Now....the RAMs originally on the board were Toshiba 2016-10 RAMs. The replacements I got are Sharp 5016-15 types.
The chips are fully compatible, the only difference is the speed. The Toshiba's have -10 and the Sharps -15 which means the Sharps can handle a bit lower speed. However, this never caused a problem with the other 2 I have been using.
Thinking I might have been lucky with the working 2 to handle the speed, I got out yet another new RAM and swapped one Sharp for the other.
No dice, still the same issue.

There is a Mark Spaeth SW/ESB kit on the board set, never gave a problem.

The same things happen on both SW and ESB, very often when you get hit, it reboots.

I have done all the obvious stuff, meaning reseating the kit PCBs, reseating the VRAMs, reseating the interconnect board, I checked the +5 Voltages, nice and stable.

All the tests run fine except the Novram test but I believe it is normal for that to produce an error when there's a SW/ESB kit on there.

So.......now I am lost/desperate. Of course I have still my spare PCB set but swapping out boards between sets is a PITA with the kit installed...

Anyway have an idea ?
 
Uhhh......seemed it was only a very short problem ?!?!?

I reseated a lot of chips, switched the boot-up game from ESB to SW (which I already wanted to do for a long time ;)) reconnected everything and now the games works flawlessly again.

Weird.
 
Thanks guys. Yeah replacing all sockets might be a good idea but Im not sure that was the issue....

Im not sure how the SW/ESB kit works, maybe switching it from ESB to SW re-initialized it or something ? At least all my hi scores are gone ! Not very important because I finally figured out that the game was set too hard.

At least it wasn't on factory defaults.....which explanes my low hi scores :)

I had to move it from hard to moderate and the number of shields from 6 to 8....

Not sure if these are the "official" settings for WR stuff but usually they use the defaults....

One thing I MUST do is replace the edge connectors. the originals are still there and they were still pretty tight when I bought it. However, I have removed and replaced the board set so often now that they start to loose their grip. Been removing it so much because of the VRAM failures, testing my 18 Euro spare PCB set, installing SW/ESB kits on mine and a friend's board set etc.....

On the other hand, if that would be the problem, why don't I have it happening now ?

O well....very happy it's back :)
 
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