Re: Assistance with Star Wars w/Clay's ESB Kit --- SW novram clobber?

  I don't have my schematics in front of me but I have an early version
of Clay's kit where there is no NVRAM switching. In my setup each game
clobbers the NVRAM settings and both are factory reset on powerup.

Clay did mention that he had some issues with certain 2212's that seemed
to be incompatible. Here is the important part of the thread that Clay
discusses the issues about using non Xicor 2212's..

"Chris" <gougeman@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:1115578961.363114.202110@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...
> Clay, can you clarify what you mean by "very slim success" with MarkC's
> X2212s? I received my ESB kit this past week (thanks!) and was going to
> order some NOVRAMs from him to fill the empty spot, but if they have
> issues...

Well, (and I mean this with no disrespect whatsoever to MarkC or his
parts--
he's a good guy and he gets a lot of hard-to-find chips for really
reasonable prices) I kinda think that the X2212's Mark has were not made by
Xicor and are possibly/probably an X2212 "like" part that someone else put
out there or remarked or whatever...

A few reasons:

1) they're not marked like Xicor marked their parts when they were in
production
2) they're not marked like the "lifetime buy" parts Xicor did on their last
production run (I bought direct from them a "lifetime" supply (so I
thought!) when they EOL'd the X22C12 and Mark's are not like the ones I
had)
3) they're pretty unreliable running on the SW/ESB multigame (probably 90%
fallout-- I quit using them)
4) some Ham radio guys (they're the ones I sold most of my original X2212's
to) have problems with them too and now specify "real Xicor" chips instead.

I have no doubt that there's something about my daughtercard design that
*makes* them not work well, but I also know that the "real" X22C12's I'd
been using for the last ~9 years functioned just fine.

So, I'd say to get Mark's parts, swap one onto a different board that
doesn't mind the difference (like Food Fight or FireFox or maybe a
non-multigamed Star Wars?) and put the (original) X2212 on the SW/ESB
daughterboard instead.

-Clay

On 2/20/2011 11:42 AM, Altan (GAPAS) wrote:
> I'm lucky to have acquired a Star Wars with Clay's ESB kit. I believe the kit is v3.91 (but I should have written it down when I took the boardset out).
>
> I've dug through messages on vectorlist.org, RGVAC as well as KLOV forums but haven't found a solution to what I'm seeing.
>
> When I got the game, I realized the Star Wars part was not storing settings. It would keep defaulting to the DIP switches. The ESB game was storing settings. I replaced a single 2212 on Clay's PCB. I picked the 2212 that the v3.x manual indicates should be swapped from the SW PCB to the Clay kit. I guessed that a swapped 2212 would have more used cycles than the one provided with the kit.
>
> I'm assuming this is the 2212 used for SW novram. Is that right?
>
> The reason I believe the above is because the Star Wars game now stores the settings. That's a good improvement. ESB also continues to store the settings.
>
> I thought everything was perfect until I realized that switching from ESB to Star Wars --- with the game turned off --- causes Star Wars to drop its settings. FWIW, since the games individually store their settings, this tends to indicate no voltage issues going to the 2212 part.
>
> I've heard of some problems people occasionally have with the kit, but this one seems unique. Since I don't have a schematic or theory of operation for the mod, it's difficult to try and debug the issue. For example, if I find out that the 2212 I replaced is actually the ESB novram then things are acting very strange. I wonder if something is messed up where both games are using a single 2212?
>
> I appreciate any assistance that is offered.
>
> ... Altan
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Received on Sun Feb 20 18:40:38 2011