Another board on the bench from my friend Enrico, this game is also known as Dark Seal 2 and it has been released by Data East on 1992.

The board is experiencing several audio effects issues from jerky sound, unstable volume and sometimes a strange kind of “motorboating” sound … it’s time to take a deeper look at the board!

These symptoms are typical and they are usually generated by one or more bad capacitors on the audio amp circuit, the power amp is a Toshiba TA8205. Here is a close up of the audio section of the board:

Looking at the solder side of the pcb we can quickly spot few loosen connection of some capacitors that should be reflowed and a totally broken solder pad, the first on left.

I fixed the missing pad with a jumper wire, it should be connected to the ground plane but it’s on the component side of the board, the via is damaged, so i found an alternative ground connection point and patched it.

I also removed all the capacitors and checked them against my tester, two of them, the big ones on the outer ends, must be replaced they are gone out of specs over the time.

I removed and checked all the capacitor on the audio section and i found several poor or loosen connection so they must be all reflowed, here are the affected caps:

All the capacitors on red circles must to be resoldered or replaced, only the two on the yellow circles were in good working conditions.

Now it’s time to deep testing the game! 🙂

Another case closed!