My Blitz 99 died

[Otho]

I was hoping to find some suggestion for my 99 NFL Blitz.  Was working one day and just stopped the next.  It is still turning on but the screen is blank.  I found some suggestion online about replacing the hard drive.  Did that and no change.  Any help or suggestion would be appreciated. 

[honkey]

Have you tried a replacement cap kit?

[MonMotha]

Is it playing blind (i.e. you get sounds and such when you coin up the game)?  If yes, you have a monitor issue.  If no, you have a game board issue.

If the latter, ensure the power up tests are enabled.  If they're disabled and the hard drive is bad, the game will appear dead as it reset loops trying to load the game off the drive.  Unfortunately, the replacement hard drives are almost all for the bootleg versions and often won't work if you happen to actually have a legit board, so replacing the hard drive with one off ebay or similar may not fix the problem.  Make sure switch bank 2 (U8) SW7 is OFF to enable the power up tests.

If the former (monitor), the first step is to figure out what monitor you have.  There's a sticky thread in the monitor forum regarding how to go about doing that.

[Q*Bert_OP]

Is it playing blind (i.e. you get sounds and such when you coin up the game)?  If yes, you have a monitor issue.  If no, you have a game board issue.
  Unfortunately, the replacement hard drives are almost all for the bootleg versions and often won't work if you happen to actually have a legit board, so replacing the hard drive with one off ebay or similar may not fix the problem. 

Bootleg Seattle board? Do tell.

Never heard of such thing, and as long as the drive is imaged correctly, a home made drive works.

[MonMotha]

There are TONS of bootleg Seattle games floating around.  Vegas/Durango too.  Most of the Sportstations I've been able to check are bootleg, and many of the Blitz 2k Gold as well.  Blitz 99 seems much rarer (in fact, I'm not sure I've ever seen one).

Most still use a security chip, but it shows up in the test menu as "DEVELOPMENT PIC", so I assume it's either a copy or reconstruction of one of the security chips used internally at Midway for development.  Unfortunately, due to the way the security on Seattle works (it maps several key IO lines differently depending on the instructions of the security chip), you also need a hacked up version of the hard drive, or it won't boot.  Hence, there's a couple versions of the drive floating around: one for the legit security chip, and one for the bootleg.  The ones on eBay seem to almost always be for the bootleg (but not always; the sellers don't even usually know what they have), while the MAME CHD (2k, at least) does appear to be legit.