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Thought I'd share this with you all. A friend of mine has created a Snappy Viper game on his zx spectrum. Its quite amusing and clever how he did this Hope you can get to watch this and leave a comment for him. Cheers.

i actually think i can help here take the machine out into your garden , set it ablaze itll never bother you again after that merry christmas

With not too much to go on, I would say check on all the usual suspects first and then check for faults afterwards. There are loads of threads on here concerning MPU3 repairs, my workshop thread for one. The usual suspects are the three smoothing caps underneath, if they are the original blue LCR ones they are most likely shot. Any green gunge or rust on the transistors around the reset circuit and/or components will need changing. Next thing is the RAM sockets (if it's separate chips) if they are contaminated. Bad connections on the ROM cart, this usually shows if you tap or move the cart and it locks up. Reels alarming can be cables and/or dry joints on the connector. Of course there could be a myriad of other reasons but it's always good to get the basics out of the way first. Good luck Bob

My account is back ! 🎉

This last board has been doing funny things, the main symptom was running very slow and it had also been noticed that the lamps were a little dim. The slow running (roughly half speed) was very odd. The first thoughts would have been that there was something amiss with the clock but once the scope was connected it showed a good 1MHz waveform. So what was it? With all these weird faults sometimes it's the most stupid of things that cause them. In this case it was the slighlty dim lamps that really was the clue. If you look at the board a few pics back you should be able to see FL3 which is next to the power socket. This is just a small piece of fuse wire and joins the two rectifiers together on their positive sides. You can't see it in the pic as the res is too low but it must have fused at some point leaving the board supplied with only half wave rectification! This would have accounted for the dim lamps. Replacing the fuse wire and all was back to full speed? I'm still a bit bemused as to why this should affect the speed as all the sounds (and associated lamps) were slow as was the reel solenoid releases? One for the fault book methinks.

Already got a DX in progress for this one. Thanks for the roms @loo