The restoration of a 1980's Williams Defender arcade machine
Testing the Chad’s Arcade Defender Memory High Score Save Chip
Our very nice friends at Chads Arcade sent over a couple of their Defender High Score save chips so that I could test them on our Defender machines at Skywire
And these kits are great – replacing the need to have the 3 x AA batteries, or CR2032 battery conversions on the main motherboard by a static DRAM FRAM memory chip, that permanently saves your high scores
To install, depending on your Motherboard, you need to remove the existing PCD5101 CMOS RAM chip as shown in these photos
and once installed you can save your Highscores like normal without ever (*well not for a very very long time) having to worry about your batteries going flat or leaking all over your Motherboard and ruining your PCB with battery acid – Happy Days!
You can find Chad at chadsarcade@gmail.com and on UKVAC if you want to get one for your Defender too 🙂
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about 6 years ago
thanks for the info.. going to email Chad to find out a price 🙂
about 5 years ago
I have a defender game, I am looking into saving the scores? And possibly upgrade?
about 4 years ago
My Defender arcade machine started bringing up the menu whenever I turned it on. Also I think the high score were not saving. I replaced the CR2032 battery but no still not saving and menu always come up. Any ideas?
Thanks
Dave
about 4 years ago
If the menu comes up every time either the machine is still in Auto-Up mode (the middle red button inside the coin door to the right) or the battery power is not working
First try inverting the mode of the middle sticky-state button on the inner coin door button panel (3 red buttons)
Else check the power to the CMOS chip when the machine is off to see if it is getting +5V from the CR2032 battery (I think CR2032s are less V so it maybe what ever that is rated at)
about 3 years ago
Hi,
Just a little thing but this chip isn’t static RAM. And DRAM is a different thing altogether! Particularly, static and dynamic (DRAM) RAMs, are the two types of RAM used in the old days. And still are, outside of the weird terminology in PCs.
It’s correctly an FRAM, ferroelectric RAM. It’s RAM just like static RAM, except intrinsically non-volatile. IE doesn’t lose it’s data when there’s no power. It needs power to read and write, of course, but not to store.
So no more batteries! Could be a revolution for a lot of old arcades. Although the potential disadvantage of you can’t erase it if you *want* to by turning the power off!
In the case of Capcom “suicide batteries” etc it’s sadly of no use, since their RAM is inside custom chips, and of course the suicide behaviour was deliberate as a security measure. Bah!