The last Golden Axe I got turned out to be a painted over Robotron!!. I sold the GA board to get most of the parts to convert it back. Golden Axe seems to be a sought after game, the PCB's bring a pretty good price. One bit of advice if your going to keep the GA, change the battery! This board is highly susceptible to battery acid damage!

You +5 is way to low and this will cause problems, especially with the ram.

Ive been working with a bunch of these williams parts lately as I am restoring a Robotron and I can tell you the first thing you need to do is check your power supply voltages. Especially the +5, if this get low it cause problems just like you have described and is a very common issue due to the age of the capacitors, connectors, the bridge rectifier and other parts. From what i've seen, once you get below about 4.9 volts, you start to get Dram errors because they are not seeing the proper voltage. If your voltage is slightly to low, like maybe 4.88 volts, you can pull one leg of resistor R10 on the power supply board and it will raise the voltage about 1/10th of a volt. If you are way low on voltage, try swapping in a switcher, this is a pretty rock solid fix and direct change over kits are available on the net. Do not start pulling rams with out at least checking your voltages, also you should see 3 LED's lit on the PS board, if not the PS is definatley your problem. The Robotron manual has a ton of valuable trouble shooting info as well.

Hi, just started collecting this year and I love this hobby. I have a strong background in electronics repair and have help a ton of people get their games back up and running. I love all the support and info that site like this have available.