Trying to fix my Adventurvision.

[MarbleMad]

So I finally got my Adventurevision. Out with the screwdriver, lets take a look.

so the game spins up up the screen is black.
I clean the pins on the defender cart and the socket.

Game now spins up and gets to the point where it tries to draw the defender 'scanner' window, then it hangs.

I notice pin1, top left, in the socket is broken off so I patch that with a wire.

Game now fires up and plays but there are missing lines all over the screen.
I poke about the horrible brittle ribbon cable and do find one broken wire so I just replace the whole thing.

That helped a tiny bit. I recovered a line or 2 at the top of the screen but there are still a whole bunch missing.

I notice it uses 2114 ram chips. They die a lot in my atari games and I read the screen relies on them so they're my next suspect. Going to try swapping 'em out as soon as I can find some replacements.

I'd also have tried to reprogramme a fresh game rom but my programmer won't do 2532s. :/

<edit> managed to create a new rom .. didn't help <edit>

Still, getting there.

[Rik]

[MarbleMad]

Yeh but pin one is one you need.

I cross wired some of the led bank pins and managed to get some of the dead leds to light so I hope that's not the problem. Since it's one of the 2 things I can't really fix I'm going to try everything else first

Yeh the 2532 is a pain but you only have to change 3 pins to fool some programmers into thinking it's a 2732. I gave that a go last night and it worked a treat. I made myself a SpaceForce.

http://www.pinballeon.com/truks/etechtips.htm

I wish I'd known this when I was working on my Williams arcade game sound boards.

[Rik]

[MarbleMad]

>I was just saying that in case you wanted to use one of the actual socket pins to replace the missing/broken one.

Oh that's an idea. Thanks.

Was thinking of making the molex plate thingy out of polymorph or maybe even cast a few out of resin.

The rom hack is easy. I didn't even bother with an adaptor i just bent up he 3 odd pins and soldered little jump wires to 'em and fed the wires into the zif.

[Rik]

[MarbleMad]

maybe if everyone who ones an adventurevision ordered 500 that'd be enough.

OK.. so my sound died which gave me an excuse to change the ribon cable on the joystick/sound board too sound's back.

I socketed my 2114 ram because I always suspect that stuff, didn't help..

Then I attached a bog standard LED to my display led board and probed the contacts on the dead lines.

BINGO

I definitely and definitively have about 12 busted LEDs.
ARGH.kind of surprising.
I suppose I'm lucky the resin encased ICs on the board are good.

SO..

do you think i could fit surface mounted LEDs to the thing?
<edit>
I'm thinking KP-1608IT
http://www.rapidonline.com/netalogue/specs/72-8500e.pdf

[MarbleMad]

I fitted one of those LEDs and it's a bit brighter than the originals but it's not to bad.



the solder job is HORRIBLE.

One down lots to go.


<EDIT>


6 hours later....





The brightness is actually just about bang on.
the only way to spot the replacement lines really is the spacing sometimes isn't perfect.

I'm pretty pleased with this.

[Rik]

That's cool... I'd almost love to replace them all with bright white LEDs to see how that looked (with the red screen plastic, and maybe with clear plastic... ) Maybe with something common like a Mattel Football though...

That's definitely going the extra mile to repair a game! Nice to see it working again!

Rik

[blanka]

White leds have a drop voltage of 3v, where red ones just do 1.5v. Jou should replace the resistors too and check if the current is enough.