With some changes to the website planned over the coming weeks, it has become necessary to improve the security a little. So, with the assistance of an SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt the site has now moved across to HTTPS at long last. Hopefully I have configured everything properly and it won’t end up by…
Version 2.3 has been ordered from the PCB makers and will hopefully fix the remaining incorrect track and complete the development of this PCB. I’ve mentioned this on Facebook (on the Gorf group) and had several questions about it, so in an attempt to answer those I have added an information page to the website…
Version 2.2 of the PCB built for Gorf including the 5v regulation to power the MiSTer direct from the cabinet’s power supply. This version uses a 2 amp version of the 7805 regulator and a couple of smoothing capacitors and takes power from the 12v line on the cabinet. An alternate version uses a commonly…
One of the members of UKVAC (Aaron) put together a piece of test gear that allows you to visually check the signals on an IC whilst the board is running normally and I picked one up earlier this year as it can do a few things that the ABI Board master cannot. Having sourced a…
Carnival on a Gremlin / Sega Vic Dual PCB. Just had blue bars on screen, although probing the Z80 showed it was trying to run code. Using a logic probe I discovered that the /WRITE signal of the ram chips was always high. This signal comes from a 74LS10 at U77. Checked this chip and…
I did some more testing and changes on the MiSTer -> Astrocade interface and have made some changes. Main PCB now includes a ‘Menu’ button to bring up the main OSD. The third speech only channel has been added for Wizard of Wor and I fixed the missing track from V2. The RGB board has…
After some major modifications to the existing screen mount hardware I have managed to fit the full HD industrial display unit into the original casing for the virtual pinball. Almost a perfect fit, you can just see the screen surround on the left and right. However, it now handles full HD, so that, combined with…
The existing HD plasma screen in the playfield of my virtual pinball now has a couple of lines across it and flickers badly from time to time. So after keeping an eye on marketplace and ebay for a while, I managed to get a Full HD Philips industrial display screen which looks pretty good in…
Guru, of mame dumping fame, reworked the PCB for the galaxian multigame to change a few of the chips to easier to come by versions, which in some cases, means surface mount. The ram can be CMOS and battery backed or FRAM instead. The DS1210 is an SMT version which should be cheaper. Some testing…
As mentioned in an earlier post, this is a version of Locomotion that had been adapted for Galaxian hardware. It wasn’t totally working and needed some errors in the code fixed as well as the colours sorting out, but it now joins the other games in the Multigame.
Whilst making recent changes to the Galaxian core on MiSTer, I looked at the newest games in the Mame core as well to see what had been added that runs on standard galaxian hardware. One, that was flagged as ‘Not Working’ was “GuttangT” I didn’t originally plan to look at this any further, but the…
Populated the necessary locations for Gorf on the new board, did some sanity checks to make sure I wasn’t putting 5v down any lines to the DE10, discovered a missing track and some layout errors. It all works and I even managed to get the speech working from DDRAM, so you don’t actually need to…
The MiSTer core for Cosmic Guerilla has been completed. This core uses a TMS9900 CPU where the original uses a TMS9980 (8 bit version of same CPU, just does 2 byte reads/writes instead of 1 word read/write). However, game speed is controlled using vertical counter, so should be the same as the original. Sound effects…
The postman bought me a package today containing the updated versions of most of the PCBs from the website as well as the new ones for the MiSTer -> Gorf (and others) interface. I need to get soldering and make sure that they actually work. I think I’ll start with the multigame, not had one…
I managed to pick up a PCB for the shield needed to build a PIN2DMD, which although it is primarily for virtual pinballs, it works in real ones and supports features such as colour files to liven up the graphics on the DMD I bought all of the parts needed to assemble it, but, due…
One of the first things I did on the MiSTer once I had acquired a setup was to take the code for the Astrocade console, add in the additional hardware used by the arcade versions of the games to see if I could get them running. (See original post here) Following that I then decided…
Capacitor burnt. (game board), particularly at C37 the capacitor was showing signs of extreme heat. Replaced them all with 22uF 25V axial electrolytics. No Speech / Some SFX missing. (game board) Output from speech chip SC01 was OK, as was output from IO Custom (X3). checked transistors in output stage and 2N4401 was faulty. (Q2)…
Since the company I used to use for PCB production has ceased doing them for general customers (they only do their own now) I have reworked all of the PCB files available from this site to meet the constraints of another company. I need to finish checking them, but should hopefully order some samples of…
Ran through self test OK, came up with chequer board screen and then reset most of the time. Occasionally would start game, but with credit noise continually playing and credits rapidly counting upwards. This is caused by CPU 4 (E5) not running properly. checked the eprom and ram (C5,D5 and E5) and ram was faulty….
Macro’s arcade website finally makes it into the current century! After many years of being a Frontpage website, it is slowly being transferred across into WordPress. Not all of the pages and news have been transferred across, so expect the rest to re-appear over the coming weeks. Hopefully it will make it much easier for…
No display – When move board, display flickers – go around board pushing each chip in turn, when press on 2E picture appears. Pin 16 rusted, only just in place. replace chip – picture back to normal. No star display. Board had been hacked to play an alternate game, pin 15 on chip 2B had…
Missing Chip. This was a converted moon cresta board. The IC at 1.2S (shoehorned in sideways between rows 1 and 2 by the sprite ram) was missing. This was not featured on any schematics I had, so I traced the connections to see what it could be. It basically takes the output from the sprite…
Crashing game. Game woud start attract mode, but shortly after would crash and boot loop. Entering test mode (hold player 1 start button whilst switching on) and it would pass first time around, but fail at random addresses on subsequent runs. The /WAIT signal on the main Z80 is handled by the IC at E2…
Glitched graphics. Screen changes as board is flexed. Moved around board pressing chips until pressing the custom surface mount chip at B6 changed the effect. Noticed that the corner most pins had come up from the board. After an unsuccessful effort to resolder them, I used some enameled 38 swg wire to solder from the…
No Sound. Signal at output of SN76477 pin 13, follow through to input of sound amp, then from output until we reach electrolytic capacitor used to decouple connection to speaker. Signal going in, nothing coming out – replace capacitor sound back to normal. Only drawing a few pixels of player balloon sprite. Following the schematics,…
I have now added the eagle files for the Galaxian multigame PCB’s to the multigame page so you can create modified versions should you desire.
The gerber files for the Galaxian multigame are now available here! – It started off as a easy to fit version of the 8 game, since they were a real pain to solder all the wire links for the colour prom. Shipping around the world for kits has been getting increasingly dodgy, with more parcels going missing this year…