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This board comes from a fellow enthusiast who had taken a crack at it with no success. Luckily he installed sockets in a lot of places which should make some things much easier to diagnose!

The schematics are available (although a little fuzzy) in the manual. Missile Command runs on a 6502A CPU, like several other Atari boards. So the first thing we want to do is check all the bare minimums on the CPU. Turning on the board showed a solid blue screen and no activity on any pins on the CPU, besides the watchdog circuit resetting the CPU on its own about twice a second.

Why did I bother to post this picture

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Introducing FLEP adapters! These are intended to help you replace your broken or missing Bipolar PROM for arcade PCBs and other projects.

I had trouble finding a way to program old PROMs, often used on older boards for color information, so I decided to come up with a solution. FLEP stands for FLash/EProm, supporting 39SF010A (or equivalent) 1Mbit Flash or 27C010 (or equivalent) EPROM. The hard part is finding chips fast enough since the original PROMs were very fast. I have been using 55ns SST39SF010A so far with perfect results on older arcade game PCBs.

Available types:

FLEP-82S123-L and FLEP-82S123-R: 32 x 8 PROMs. Replaces 82S123, 82S123A, 63S081, 6331-1, 18S030, 7603-5, 27S19AC, 74S288, 5610, 7051. Also open collector variants 82S23, 6330-1, 18SA030, 7602-5, 27A18AC, 74S188, 82S23A. 

FLEP-82S129-L and FLEP-82S129-R: 256 x 4 and 512 x 4 PROMs. Replaces 82S126, 82S129, 82S130, 82S131 and their variants. 82S129, 6301-1, 24S10, 7611-5, 29661, 27S21, 74S287, 3621, 82S129A, 63S141, 7611A, 27S21A, 7052, 82S126, 6300-1, 24SA10, 7610-5, 29660, 27S20, 74S387, 3601, 82S126A, 63S140, 7610A, 27S20A, 82S131, 6306-1, 7621-5, 29611, 27S13, 74S571, 3622, 82S131A, 63S241, 7621A, 27S13A, 74S571A, 3622A, 82S130, 6305-1, 7620-5, 29610, 27S12, 74S570, 3602, 82S130A, 63S240, 7620A-5, 27S12A, 74S570A, 3602A.

FLEP-82S137-L and FLEP-82S137-R: 1024 x 4 PROMs. Replaces 82S137 and variants. 82S137, 6353-1, 24S41, 7643-5, 29641, 27S33, 74S573, 3625, 82S137A, 63S441, 7643A, 74S573A, 82S137B, 63S441A, 7643B, 27S33A, 74S573B, 7054.

All cross-reference data from Mike's Arcade.

A FLEP-82S123-L replacing an 82S123 at 6L on a Galaxian.

A FLEP-82S123-L and a FLEP-82S123-R replacing 63S081s at IC6 and IC7.

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Black Tiger is a platformer from Capcom in 1987, and also goes by the name of Black Dragon in Japan. We'll be working on a pair of bootlegs.

The game has some interesting adventure features like buying weapons and collecting keys to open doors. Personally, I think the graphics are iconic of late 80s games with some big sprites and fluid little animations. The control is nice and responsive, allowing you to navigate the levels nimbly. I think the music is fun too, but I don't think everyone would agree.

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Hello faithful readers,

Back again, this time with some new tools to play with.

I have to start off by raving about the NeoLoch LLC Inquisitor board and SRAM blade. The Inquisitor board is a platform for IC testing and more, and the blades add compatibility to specific families. The SRAM blade does all the common SRAM I've come across, such as 2114, 6264, 62256, 2147, 2148.. nicely this includes the 4-bit SRAM that most EPROM writers don't bother to include compatibility for. In general, I've found that my Topmax 3100 EPROM writer doesn't do a good job of testing SRAM at all, since all it allows you to do is write a specific set of data to the SRAM and read it back. Anyway, I bought the unassembled combo, and had it up and running in about half an hour.

Let's take a look at this bootleg Ghosts 'N Goblins.

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Hello true believers,

I originally had this Legendary Wings marked "working". Thought I'd give it a few rounds of play time, and listen to some of that beautiful Capcom arcade soundtrack. Check it out:

 
Courtesy World of Longplays

So I fire it up, and... I'm not impressed. The music sounds a little thinner than I remember. I loaded the ROM up in MAME to compare and yes indeed, it actually sounds like the board is missing about half the instruments. My eyes turned to the sound section of the PCB and behold, the reason it only had half of the sounds: