Star Wars – Repair Log

So I’ve (foolishly) embarked on building a working Atari Star Wars test rig, as it’s pretty much the only other game I remember from the arcades that I would want to own if I had the space for it!

First acquisition is a Star Wars main PCB

This is basically the brains of the 3 board system, being powered by a 6809EP processor and contains the main program ROMs and game code

It’s in a pretty bad way though with at least 5 TTL chips missing and the ROMs look pretty smashed up

So here’s the missing chips

1 x 74LS245 (octal bus transceiver)
1 x 74LS138 (decoder)
2 x 74LS374 (multiplexer)
1 x 74LS138 (decoder)

and here’s them replaced with new sockets and new 74 chips

Missing Capacitor

74LS138

74HC374

74LS245

Then next job is to build up a test rig to get the correct power to the board

I’m going to use a 40 pin socket mapped to Jamma with a finger board, and then connect it to a Vortex Supergun (Jamma specification) to give the required voltages

Star Wars PCB pin out as per below and for the 10.3V voltage that Star Wars uses we’re going to use the +12V off of the Jamma rig

So here’s that all rigger together – note the ATX power supply I’m using is from an old PC as it supplies -5V as well as +5V and +12V – the newer ones only have +5V and +12V

But before we power it up lets do some basic sanity checks, and also look into that bust EPROM.

Removing the EPROMs very gently using a flat headed screwdriver – all of them are cracked or crack as they are removed. I’ve never seen this with any other board I have done this with so this poor old Star Wars PCB has obviously been in the Wars itself!