World Rally Championship repair log

[yosai]

Just bought a confirmed graphically glitching World Rally championship PCB from Slapaham.



Fired it up there are pretty bad graphical glitches and some sprites missing like so.



the underside had some fairly hefty scratches across a few track so these were bridged and the board retested.



Some more scratches.



Same problem. Time to inspect the PCB some more.



EPROMS I7 & I9 appear to be in a pretty rough state.



Once removed it was clear that the IC sockets were covered in corrosion. I cleaned the corrosion off the best I could with a very fine tipped screwdriver.



I7, I9 & I11 all had corrosion on their legs. These were cleaned with some fine sandpaper. I9 also had one of it's legs missing (the nearest to the camera) this was replaced with a nice metal pin soldered on to the stump.



Re tested... Looking good, Chimpton agrees.



All I need to do now is rotate the monitor.

[yosai]

There were a lot more photos but due my camera skills and crappy camera phone these were omitted.

[goatboy]

Impressive! How did you bridge the tracks?

[yosai]

Cheers. The 'write up' isn't very detailed though.

The tracks were scraped back to the copper track and then soldered over. The breaks in the track, if any, were hairline so it wasn't very difficult.

I couldn't take any pictures of the track repairs because the camera couldn't focus properly.

[jonny5]

what are you running that on, as i noticed in your pics you dont have the video ground connected(as seems usual for this board), but you are getting a proper picture?

do you have the video ground tied into the jamma ground on the harness?

nice work on the fix.....enjoy the game....its loads of fun!!

[yosai]

what are you running that on, as i noticed in your pics you dont have the video ground connected(as seems usual for this board), but you are getting a proper picture?

The picture looks fine. Brightness/contrast and chroma look good and the image is nice and stable.

do you have the video ground tied into the jamma ground on the harness?

It's an Egret 2 with an MS9 monitor. There cab has video ground wired to pin14 ok by the looks of it. I don't have a multimeter to test if its connected the other end.

I played it for an hour or so last night, playing the harder tracks on a 29" monitor is enough to give you motion sickness.

[Devil Soundwave]

Nice work!

[jonny5]

sorry you misunderstood me i think....

if you look at the PCB, you will note that the video ground(pin 14) isnt tied into the jamma header(the trace stops short of the pin)...so it should give a garbled screen(it does on most setups ive seen it running on)....can you look at your harness and see if it has pin 14 and the jamma ground tied in together somehow?

if not, how is it working? i couldnt get a picture on any of my cabs until i tied the jamma and video ground together on the PCB

im just trying to figure out why they would make a PCB that lacked the video ground if most cabs need it to sync properly.....and beyond that, why it seems to work on some cabs and not others....

very odd PCB....fun game though

also, put your sticks on 2 way....makes a big difference

[yosai]

Sorry man. Pin 14 on an Egret 2 JAMMA header goes directly to ground on the monitor chassis. I currently have no way of testing if this is a common ground with the cab, but judging by your experience it looks like it could be.

On a slightlu different note. The 'DO NOT REMOVE' black box in the middle of the PCB contains a suicide battery. That was nice of them.

Galeco
Galeco, an arcade manufacturer in Spain, most famous in the US for World Rally and Great 1000 Miles Rally 1 & 2, made heavy use of suicide batteries. Their batteries are particularly nasty. They used a Dallas Semiconductor DS5002 microcontroller to protect their boards, which has up to 128k of battery-backed RAM containing a program for the 5002 to execute. This program actually patches bits of the main CPU's code. If the battery dies, the 5002 no longer makes the correct patches and the game won't run. Typical symptoms of a dead battery are a "coprocessor not responding" message and/or a loss of sync. The game will still show their demos, but eventually lock up. They will not be playable. The games known to have suicide batteries are:

World Rally
Alligator Hunt
World Rally 2
Touch & Go
Maniac Square
Thunder Hoop 2
Strikes Back
Glass

And the following may have batteries, but have not been verified:

Target Hits
Salter

There is currently no fix for these games other than to send them back to Spain to be fixed. You might have success replacing the batteries before they die. (Make sure you maintain power to the battery contact points at all times when replacing the battery). *update* Lutz Blasinski from .de wrote to say he successfully revived an Alligator Hunt by replacing the 2 Eproms :44n and 45n from his PCB with the MAME unprotected Roms: ahntu44n.040 and ahntu45n.040. w00t™

http://www.arcadecollecting.com/dead/dead.html"

[jonny5]

hmmmm....interesting....and still odd...because somebody else said it didnt work in there e2, but it did work in an older woody cab.....

curiouser and curiouser

pretty sure they are fixable now if they suicide since gaelco released the romset....they even helped the mame team get it working in mame

kinda cool

ive also seen boards that were modded with battery holders for cr2032s