Tempest - garbage characters instead of text

MadocOwain

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Game plays fine, but none of the text characters are decipherable. Might as well be in Chinese! I thought it might have been my Clay Cowgill Multitempest giving me issues, so I removed it and replaced my ROMS.. same issue. If I go into test mode, I get the first photo below, nothing I can use. No beeps or boops at startup, unless I press buttons. I flipped the test switch on and off to get the second photo below. The third photo is of actual gameplay.

I re-seated the chips and removed and replaced the connectors. Given that the game plays and sounds fine in general, I'm probably having an issue with a specific chip. Any ideas which ones to check first?

Thanks!
 

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Looks a lot like a bad RAM chip. Have you run the RAM test ? You don't
need the monitor to work, the start button LED will blink once for each
good RAM chip.

JD
 
The RAM test doesn't behave as expected. "Self-test procedure Part 2 Test 1" (from http://www.gamefaqs.com/dreamcast/526672-atari-anniversary-edition/faqs/9458) shows the white box with a divider in the middle and gibberish. There are no tones other than the one short beep when selecting the test (cycling through using SLAM switch), and no LEDs flash - they stay solid.

Worth noting that gameplay is fine except there's no text. All other gfx sound and controls are fine. LEDs flash normally during attract mode (set to freeplay).

I'd think maybe I had a bad ROM on the Analog Vector Generator PCB but those are replaced by Clay's multikit, and I have the same issue with or without the kit installed.

Weird.
 
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