Identifying Parts

[channelmaniac]

When buying boards from people to either part out or repair, one question that comes to mind is "What is it?"

There are several ways to identify boards, Konami puts information on the silk screen printing that makes it easy to Google for the ID. Other boards have labels on the ROMs that either tell what the game is, or can be used in a Google search to find the name.

Others can be quite a bit tougher. No names on the boards, no labels on the ROMs, and no other clues as to what the board is. For these, you'll want to use an EPROM programmer along with the ROMIDENT utility. Simply read the ROM chip in the programmer, save it as a raw file to the directory where ROMIDENT is, then run ROMIDENT against that file to identify the game.

But, what if ROMIDENT can't identify it? Simply take the 32 bit checksum value output by ROMIDENT and run that value through Google. If the ROM has been dumped as part of the MAME project then you'll find it and the identity for the unknown board.

ROMIDENT can be found at: http://www.system16.com/romident.php

[channelmaniac]

What if you have a monitor to repair or recap but you can't tell what it is?

There are many sites on the web that have pictures of different monitor makes and models that will help you determnie what the monitor is. This is done by the way the chassis, also known as the circuit boards, are designed and laid out. The tube type has NOTHING to do with what model of monitor you have. In fact, many tubes are interchangeable between different chassis!

Here is a list of sites to use in determining what your monitor is:

http://homearcade.org/BBBB/monitor.html
http://www.jomac.net.au/mon.htm
http://www.zax.com.au/amusementmachines.html
http://www.arcadecup.com/
http://www.medi-gmbh.com/chassis/chassis.htm (in German)

If you decide to not fix your monitor but would rather buy an aftermarket chassis to replace the one in your game, here are a few sites:

http://home.earthlink.net/~arcadeparts/index.html
http://alvaamusement.com/
http://yp.bellsouth.com/sites/alvaamusement/
http://www.8liners.com/datatech/monitor.html

Thanks to Ken Layton for the links!

[channelmaniac]

Datasheets and pinouts for IC chips, diodes, transistors, and other semiconductors can be a bear to find at times. Here are several sources for this type of information:

http://www.datasheetarchive.com
http://www.datasheetarchive.co.uk (Yes, sometimes you'll find things at one of these and not the other)

http://www.alldatasheet.com
http://doc.chipfind.ru

http://nte01.nteinc.com/nte/NTExRefSemiProd.nsf/$$Search?OpenForm (NTE does cross references to their parts and has datasheets on their replacement parts)

http://www.z80.info/ (A GREAT source for anything related to the Z80 family of chips and their derivitives)

http://www.classiccmp.org/rtellason/parts-index.html

http://www.xs4all.nl/~ganswijk/chipdir/ (The Chip Directory - lots of pinouts and descriptions of chips)