Marauder question...

[hex65000]

I picked up a beater copy of Marauder recently and I sat down to play it and I ran into some functionality problems. It starts up, but occasionally the screen just goes blank randomly and I've got to power cycle the Atari to get out of it. Since the label was already ruined and the screws were exposed, I did what any respectable man would do:

 

I took it apart.

 

The inside is an original Tigervision board but under the shield there appears to be a socketed EPROM. The solder job is bad and there's a solder glob on one of the edge connector contacts.

 

From memory, I was under the impression that only Bomb, homebrew carts, and perhaps some other obscure cart publisher used Eproms, and everybody generally used Mask Roms. I haven't pulled the shield off of the board yet, but there is a square lump in the middle of the IC and I definitely would not expect it to be a socketed device. So the question is simple: Everything instinctively says this was a rebuilt cart and possibly someone upstream thought they could pawn this off as the real thing. Am I correct or not?

 

Aside question: Do the Bomb carts use the 7404 trick to function or are they just Eproms on boards?

 

Hex.

[ Sometimes knowing WHERE to look for a problem solution is the greatest challenge... ]

[brucebidder]

Interesting I am posting so I can see what other people say it sounds fishy to me... But why all the work on a crappy looking cart unless they were experimenting with making another rare commavid game but then gave up... I am curious about the eprom...

[+Omegamatrix]

Most companies used masked roms, but some times there are short runs made with eproms. Coleco springs to mind. I have a Mr. Do! that is eprom. I'm not surprised Tigervision used a few eproms.

[CPUWIZ]

I picked up a beater copy of Marauder recently and I sat down to play it and I ran into some functionality problems. It starts up, but occasionally the screen just goes blank randomly and I've got to power cycle the Atari to get out of it. Since the label was already ruined and the screws were exposed, I did what any respectable man would do:

 

I took it apart.

 

The inside is an original Tigervision board but under the shield there appears to be a socketed EPROM. The solder job is bad and there's a solder glob on one of the edge connector contacts.

 

From memory, I was under the impression that only Bomb, homebrew carts, and perhaps some other obscure cart publisher used Eproms, and everybody generally used Mask Roms. I haven't pulled the shield off of the board yet, but there is a square lump in the middle of the IC and I definitely would not expect it to be a socketed device. So the question is simple: Everything instinctively says this was a rebuilt cart and possibly someone upstream thought they could pawn this off as the real thing. Am I correct or not?

 

Aside question: Do the Bomb carts use the 7404 trick to function or are they just Eproms on boards?

 

Hex.

[ Sometimes knowing WHERE to look for a problem solution is the greatest challenge... ]

 

Bomb carts rarely use EPROM's, the mask ROM's are what is dying on them. All Tigervision 4K games use EPROM's, period, but not socketed.

[hex65000]

Really? I know the Bomb carts are legendary for being failure prone. However, I expected them to be Eproms. Has there been a satisfactory explanation as to why their parts experienced such a high failure rate? I would think a hard-coded ROM would hold up a lot better than any Eprom.

 

Yeah, the socket and bad solder job were the other 'tip off' things that said something was amiss. The spring was missing inside the cart so inserting it was a treat. I was gambling that maybe it came loose and since it was already opened for whatever reason I may be able to repair it. At the very least I'll probably clean the board up to make it look a little better.

 

I don't think it's the handiwork of the person I got this stuff from, AFAIK, she's a pretty stand-up member here.

 

Hex.

[ Shall be spending money on politics... this is an unexpected event... ]

[+Omegamatrix]

One spring missing or both of them? If you look at some Tigervision carts they have two long prongs sticking out and they don't move at all. Others have two short tabs and the door slides back and forth. The trick is both carts are the same. Since your cart is already taken apart look at the insert with the tabs. You'll see you can either put it in a groove in the cart and have the long prongs exposed or reverse it and have a sliding door.

 

 

The point is if the springs are missing it probably didn't have them, and would have originally came with the long prongs exposed.