Warlords issues

YellowDog

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Donor 2011, 2013
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I was helping a friend try to fix his Warlords cocktail over the weekend and it was showing a couple of problems. The monitor completely collapsed to a spot, but he had a spare monitor, so that was no problem once I modified the case with a hacksaw to fit the cabinet (thanks for the assist Christian).

The real problem, and I am not sure it is one problem, is with the sprites. The shields do not move around the outside walls, they mostly go back and forth along the vertical edge of the screen and every once in a while they will make part of a swing around the castles.

The other issue is the sprites for the dragon are all messed up. The castles look good, the text looks good, the fireballs look good and the images of the shields look good. The dragon flickers on and off.

From the schematic, it looks like the potentiometers all go to the POKEY chip through a set of op amps. Since all of the pots are acting the same, that leads me to believe that the issue is with any of the commpon components, which would be:
(a) the POKEY chip
(b) the transistors Q7 & Q8
(c) the op amps (possible, but not likely that all 4 would fail simultaneously)

Any other possibilities that I missed?

What other Atari games used the same POKEY chip so I can have him try robbing one from a different game to see if that is the issue?

Thanks for any help. We are trying to get this back running for the annual drunken Warlords tournament at the Houston Arcade Show, so time is critical (the show starts Friday).

Thanks for any help.

ken
 
This is my thinking on your problem.

Bad sprites. seem to indicate a bad rom or a bad ram issue. I think I lean towards a bad rom issue because of the messed up dragon if this was more of a bad ram issue the rest of the graphics should be messed up too.

If the roms pass being verified in an eprom programmer, I would start looking at the sockets. I would look for stuck data lines with a logic probe first before looking for stuck addressing lines.

If the roms are corrupt the controls might not work.
 
I probably should have mentioned that it passed both the ROM test and the RAM test.

I also reseated all of the socketted chips, ROMS, PROMS, CPU and POKEY chips without any significant changes.

ken
 
If the ram and rom pass testing there should not be odd graphics of the screen..
Yet there is.

Was this a working board that died on you or was this was someone's project bought you got?

If was someone else's project board they might have installed slow ram was used its would pass being tested but would fail when it was pressed into service..

I still would have toss the EPROMs into a reader and do a quick verify. I am not sure how good the internal test is.

You are getting good voltages by taking reading off the board it self. Right?
 
This was a working board that was in storage for most of the last year. It was working last month when the vertical collapsed on the monitor. When I replaced the monitor the other issues were found. I didn't have the schematics when I was looking at the board but it was showing 4.97 V at the ROMs when I checked. I don't know what the other voltages should have been, so I couldn't test for them.

ken
 
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The 2101s are notorious for failing. I would suspect that one or more are bad even if you are passing the ram test.

Piggybacking them in pairs is one quick and dirty test.

The control issue could be the pokey or a bad connection - even if the pokey is OK during self test.

Bill
 
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