The cabinet is still in storage, but since I knew the board has issues I brought it home to repair here in my spare time. Luckily the Galaxian cab conversion in my boys room still has the factory Galaxian harness in it. All I had to do was populate the fuses, pop on the video connector and I have a “test bench” for Galaxian. For Pac-Man and Ms Pac-Man too, but my Pac-Man board is far from getting to the ‘test phase”.

As well as the board from the cabinet, I also have a board I purchased off a BYOAC member a number of years ago. I don’t even know why I bought it, I had no plans at the time to resurrect my Galaxian conversion to Galaxian, and didn’t know I’d be buying a complete one.

Needless to say that board doesn’t work properly. Well…neither of them do. The one I bought seems to have correct colors, but the video sync looks to be off and it’s a big smeared mess. On the one from the cab it produces a red screen filled with zeroes.

First thing I did on both boards was replace the 245s. I’ve read they can cause all kinds of problems with memory addressing. A KLOV member kindly sent not only the 245s, but also sockets!

Replacing them did nothing on the board I purchased, but on the cab board suddenly I had changes on screen, so I knew I was getting somewhere. I read that problems with ROM H (going by memory here, I’m probably wrong about the ROM number) can cause boot issues. I removed the ROMs from that area, and 30% of the legs weren’t even there, and even more came off when I removed them from the sockets.

That meant bad sockets, and luckily I had replacements. What a pain; first I removed the plastic surround. Then heated each individual pin and pulled it from the hole. Sucked the hole clean as best as I could, and cleared any remaining clogs with a stainless steel dental pick.

When I was done with that, I replaced the bad ROMs with the ones from the other board and it came up with the beginning of the boot sequence. A definite step forward. And then a new message: “BAD RAM #2”. According to what I’ve read, that means either one or both the 2114 RAM on board are bad. Since I don’t have them (or the corresponding sockets) I’ll have to wait to get them. I hate waiting, especially since I can almost guarantee there’s more wrong than just that, so I’ll have to justify shipping on more than just two chips an a couple sockets.