AFAIK my Star Wars cockpit performed beautifully all day(s) during Eurocade right, or did some of you guys notice anything wrong with it (weird graphics, rebooting ?)
I don't believe I had played it after Eurocade and powered it up today to check my work on Franck's monitor. Apart from some other problems I noticed there were things happening that didn't seem to come from the monitor....
So, I hooked up the Amplifone again and the attract mode was fine. However, as soon as I started a game the graphics started messing up, screen freezing and sometimes re-booting.
Now, being a SW veteran (
) those things happening didn't scare me because I've seen it before. These things happened whenever one of the VRAM chips had entered the land of the eternal bits....as a matter of fact I already have seen it happening twice but that _was_ a long time ago, the machine was still in temporary storage (remember Andreas ?
) Anyway, in both cases, the self-test nicely indicated which VRAM was dead, I replaced it and it worked happily ever after.
Until today.
Of course I picked up my "SW spare parts bag" and took out another new VRAM and put it in the machine. Sure enough, test mode reported it was fine now, so I started a game. Ahhh, great I thought....no more graphics problems, I could play normally. However...when i blew up the deathstar the PCB rebooted.
Now, ever since....the machine reboots when I am hit by enemy fire but also when I hit one of the catwalks in the trench and also when blowing up the death star. It is not ALWYAS but sometimes.
Now....the RAMs originally on the board were Toshiba 2016-10 RAMs. The replacements I got are Sharp 5016-15 types.
The chips are fully compatible, the only difference is the speed. The Toshiba's have -10 and the Sharps -15 which means the Sharps can handle a bit lower speed. However, this never caused a problem with the other 2 I have been using.
Thinking I might have been lucky with the working 2 to handle the speed, I got out yet another new RAM and swapped one Sharp for the other.
No dice, still the same issue.
There is a Mark Spaeth SW/ESB kit on the board set, never gave a problem.
The same things happen on both SW and ESB, very often when you get hit, it reboots.
I have done all the obvious stuff, meaning reseating the kit PCBs, reseating the VRAMs, reseating the interconnect board, I checked the +5 Voltages....
All the tests run fine except the Novram test but I believe it is normal for that to produce an error when there's a SW/ESB kit on there.
So.......now I am lost/desperate. Of course I have still my spare PCB set but swapping out boards between sets is a PITA with the kit installed...
Anyway have an idea ?
