This was an interesting one. As you know, the Hypersports Rearranged kit has been HUGELY popular (thanks to all BTW)! However, there was a customer that could not get it working without "glitches" on the sprites and characters...ugh. 100's of kits sold and I'm thinking that it's a user error. Until I did some digging around...we will get to that in a bit...
I sent another kit out to the customer. No worries. Things happen. I test each and every kit as they go out, no exception here. Customer received the kit, SAME PROBLEM! OK, well, the odds of 2 kits that have been tested and verified are bad is about .0001% chance....so, not very good chance that 2 kits are bad.
Customer sent his Hypersports pcb to a tech that was kind enough to do some THOROUGH diagnostics! Thank you!
His email -
"Hi -- This message is for Joe (*** sent me his Hyper sports board with the mult-kit to look at diagnose). He said he was working with you on the issues he was having and, well since I know more about the boards than he does and I have alot more tools (i have a full shop and test/repair a few hundred boards a year)., im pretty sure the issue is in the kit, not the board.
Let me tell you what i did: First I deconverted it back to OG. I upgraded all the ram and tested everything out. Board worked fine.. I took a video of the skeet shooting working good. Then I converted it back to the kit. The issue showed up as partial logo in background during skeet shooting that should be green also not black. took a vid of that too. I replaced the CPU just to be sure.. same issue. Rang out all the pins for continuity on the character and obj rom add ons on second board. All had continuity just fine. So.. then I took ANOTHER hypersports board (that also worked just fine OG), moved the kit over to that and exact same issue.
What it appears is that the 'garbage' in the back ground is because of a bad address (its like a partial logo for the game) so im thinking that either one of the roms is bad, or something else in the kit. He said that you thought it might be because of one of the sub boards not making connect in a socket or a bad socket perhaps. But the chances that it happens on 2 boards that work with original parts is pretty slim.
The kit is intact, no bent/missing pins. Installed properly. Its just glitching. And I was wondering how we can go about getting this fixed for him.. He's a good guy, just fat fingers sometimes. Im doing all the work for him for free and Id like to get this back to him in good shape. "
Pic of the glitches he was seeing -
I agree, it is pretty slim odds that 2 kits would not work on 2 different stacks! Weird...
So, we started looking at the things that could effect this. Well, I found that there is a Revision C Hypersports pcb. Actually a Rev C Hyper Olympics '84 to be exact.
Ugh. Well there are jumpers on the Rev C that are not on the Rev B pcbs. Revision B is well documented, however, Revision C is not. No schematics anywhere to be found.
See pic -
See the jumpers circled in yellow? These are not on a Rev B Hypersports pcb!
The Hypersports Rev C has more jumper wires than Rev B!!!
These jumpers appear to be different depending on which romset was used on the pcb (e.g. Hypersports, Hyper Olympics 84, Hypersports Centuri (copyright)
Well, these jumpers were not taken in consideration when the kit was being developed, since there is no mention of the Rev C anywhere on the web. Unreal. I can find musical squirells in Tutu's, but not a thing about this revision pcb... made me want to cry... ;)
I "guessed" that the jumper #4 (on the picture it is the one in the very bottom) is closed to gnd on a Hyper Olympics '84 pcb which causes the "glitch"
These jumpers are tied to a resister on the Rev B.
So, long story short, called the tech, had him clip the J4 jumper and lo and behold, the kit worked flawlessly!
I have also made the changes to the code today, so, anyone that may happen to have this revision (not many do!) it will no longer be an issue. Problem solved...in 2 ways...code or clipping the J4.
-EOL
