Missing sounds in Super Punch-Out ***FIXED***

[ChadTower]

Without an expert on site and the high level equipment, it's really your best shot.  Just replace each of those components one at a time, testing after each one, and eventually you'll get to the right one...

...if it's a bad component and not a bad trace.

[MaximRecoil]

Without an expert on site and the high level equipment, it's really your best shot.

[MaximRecoil]

***FIXED!!***

I replaced the LS374 (2J) first like the Nintendo engineer suggested and hooked it back up but there was no change. Then I replaced the LS374 at 2H and when I hooked it back up the sounds were all there, 100% correct, perfect!

Those sockets are great too; will make it a lot easier if I ever have to replace either one of those LS374's again.

[ChadTower]

Yeah, putting in sockets is cool... though the odds of that going bad again are low.

Nice work.  Way above and beyond reason, contacting the dude who designed the thing 20 years ago.   

[MaximRecoil]

Way above and beyond reason, contacting the dude who designed the thing 20 years ago.

LOL. He had nothing better to do, right?

From what I have read, Genyo Takeda is pretty high up in the company (senior managing director and general manager of Nintendo's Integrated Research & Development division), and has been with them since '72. He has spoken publicly on behalf of Nintendo, such as at the 2001 Spaceworld unveiling of the Nintendo GameCube.

I think it says a lot about Japanese culture that he personally read my letter and assigned one of his engineers who worked on the original Punch-Out and Super Punch-Out projects back in the day, to help as much as he could. I mean, the guy is busy working on the Nintendo Revolution and took the time to deal with a Super Punch-Out audio issue that some random guy halfway around the world was having; on a game about 20 years out of warranty; with engineers never having had the responsibilty of public tech support in the first place.

Coincidentally, not long after I got the first reply from the Nintendo engineer, I watched the movie "Pirates of Silicon Valley" (good movie BTW) and after watching it, I went to Steve Wozniak's site to see if he had anything to say about the accuracy of the events depicted in the movie. He had a whole section on it and in one of the letters that someone wrote to him it said this:

I saw Larry Ellison on an old Charlie Rose show the other day. It was from 1997 I think but anyway, he was talking about how the Japanese value service to others and view being of service to others as a path toward happiness. He said being in Japan was like being on another planet because, generally, we don't appreciate people who are of service to us in the U.S. We look upon serving others as demeaning. That's a really sad thing to say but it's true. Most of the time, if we're honest about it, we reward ruthlessness.

[MaximRecoil]

Final words from the Nintendo engineer:

I am very happy to hear that you did fix it. I will pass your best regards to Mr. Takeda.
Please enjoy the game!

[MaximRecoil]

Quick explanation, they hold the data sent from the cpu before it gets to the 2A03. There are a few other components that control signals to those chips as well, like 2D which should be a LS138 appears to clock the data in and out of 2H and 2J.

Well this bit of information came in handy two years after the fact. I was playing SPO last night when the sound (which has been working perfectly since I fixed it two years ago) suddenly went screwy in the middle of a game. The announcer was doing the count and then got stuck in a loop doing the count, repeatedly counting from 1 to 10 but in an altered tone of voice. The graphic portion of the game continued fine, but there were no sounds, aside from the announcer counting.

I restarted the machine and the wrong music came up when I powered it on, along with constant crowd noise which wasn't supposed to be there. I coined it up and the sound for that was gone. The music when you press the button to start was gone. Most of the gameplay sounds were gone or incorrect.

I tried various things like swapping the sound CPU's with known good ones, as well as the ROM that I was told holds the sound data, and that didn't help. I was about to remove all the SPO stuff and use it to convert a different, working PO board when I remembered this post. At the time, because of 2600's post here, in addition to the pair of LS374's I ordered for 2H and 2J, I also ordered a pair of LS138's for 2C and 2D. I didn't need to use them so I stuck them in the cupboard.

So I figured I'd give that a try. I replaced the LS138's at 2C and 2D with the new ones I ordered 2 years ago (along with sockets), and that did the trick. My SPO board is working perfectly again, and was only down for a couple of hours.

It was also the first real repair I've gotten to do with my new [to me] Metcal, which was nice.