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Gunsmoke repair question
Question from Chris: Hi guys, so glad to have found your website! A friend and I are restoring a Gunsmoke machine that I’ve owned for many years but which hasn’t worked in quite a while. We found a bad RAM chip and replaced it, now the game is running great except for one very peculiar bug: all the character/object sprites are only drawn on every other vertical line. See attached image. The game logic is working fine, and the game is playable minus this odd behavior with the sprites. We used a logic probe to test the side of the board that has the sprite ROMs on it, and found one IC that has one floating pin. Our fingers are crossed that this might be the culprit, but if not, have you seen this kind of problem before? Any advice or ideas? The board is designed in such a way that the traces from the chips are buried between the two layers, so we can’t follow the data path from the sprite ROMs to the logic chips, sadly. Thanks in advance for any help you might have! Best, Chris
1 answer
Response from Jonathan: Chris,
It sounds like you guys have done some great troubleshooting so far so congrats on that. From your picture, it looks more like a RAM issue than a ROM issue but I could see it being either one to be honest with you. Unfortunately we have not seen this kind of problem before with this particular board. You could try replacing the character sprite ROMs altogether but that’s definitely more of a stab in the dark than anything else. We would probably contact our friend Raymond at arcadecomponents.com about this issue. I know he’s worked on several Capcom boards in the past (including Gunsmoke) so he should be more familiar with it than we are. I wish we could be more helpful on your issue but unfortunately it’s just out of our wheelhouse. Please let us know if you do find out a solution and we’ll be sure to share it on our website.
Hope that helps. Thank you for your question and good luck with your repair.
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