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Data East Star Wars - DMD showing mostly garbage, but a few scenes render ok

Issue: The DMD is showing either all dots lit, or garbage. Sometimes it would show some scenes correctly, but most of the time garbage is displayed.

Solution: Changed the display roms to known good roms, nothing. Decided to remove the custom PALs and the memory ic (a 62256) to give the legs a good cleaning. While removing the memory ic, i noticed two bent (!) legs under the ic - whoever did this certainly never tried it afterwards.

Trying to straighten out the legs broke them off. Cut off two legs from a junk ic, soldered them on and put the ic back into the socket. DMD is now fine. Issue resolved.

Data East Star Wars - +5 volt missing/low

Issue: +5v is missing/low at +0,9v, therefore no CPU boot, nothing. The +12 and -12v are fine.

Solution: According to the schematics (link), the components responsible for +5v generation are IC1 (an MC1723CP) and TR5 (2N6057, the transistor on the huge cooling block). Changed both with known good parts, but the +5v were still at 0,9v. As these boards are all 20+ years old, looking for leaked or bulged caps is always a good idea - but visually they all looked good. I decided to desolder the caps one by one and measure them with a capacitance meter.

Started with C2 which is right after the bridge rectifier which should be a 100uf 25v cap. Once desoldered, you could see a tiny bit of leakage on the bottom side of the cap - this is unusual, because caps usually leak on the top. Sure enough, the cap measured between 6uf and 10uf. Replaced with a 100uf 35v (higher voltage is okay), and +5v are right back. Issue resolved.

 

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Cheers

Georg

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