MV-2F Video Problems

I just received a MV-2F bought at auction on eBay and was kind of surprised that it even booted up considering the price I paid for it.

Once it's booted up there is some bad video blocking/scanlines that I can't seem to get rid of. Hopefully the wisdom of the boards can shed some light on this!

Boot Screen... not too bad thus far


Warning screen... with the first signs of the video corruption


SNKP screen with tons of weird scanlines


MS5 screen with the blocking/scanlines


Lo-Res Pic of the PCB attached to the SuprNova


Hi-Res Pic of the PCB (linked out for 56K'ers)

The method I have to check the board is a MAS Systems SuprNova, which works fine with other PCBs tested. It occurs when hooked up to any TV, eventually I want to use it on this NTSC plasma tv that all of these pics are taken from.

Any ideas???

Any ideas at all....?

praedicator said:

Any ideas at all....?

Click to expand...

Hmmm.....

I have seen corruption of this type before on a number of boards.
Usually, this is due to dirty slots and cart edge-connectors.

Give your cart a good clean, use q-tips (like you would use in your ears) on the cart edge-connectors. Up and down the length of the connector.
Lots of q-tips, until they are not picking up any dirt at all.

(Not sure what the best method for cleaning slots is as I have never had to do it on one of mine. Keep your carts clean and your slots will never need cleaning.)


After you've cleaned your cart, push it in and out of the slot several times.


Then try it again.

It happens on all carts though, so could it be the cart connector on the board?

praedicator said:

It happens on all carts though, so could it be the cart connector on the board?

Click to expand...

All carts on both slots, all the time?

Gummy Bear said:

All carts on both slots, all the time?

Click to expand...

You got it.... that's what makes me worried the problem is somewhat larger than a cart cleaning

praedicator said:

You got it.... that's what makes me worried the problem is somewhat larger than a cart cleaning

Click to expand...

Agreed.
By the look of your system (i.e. you could eat your dinner off it) I'd probably rule out dirty slots as well.

You could be looking at a broken trace or two.


That would be bogus indeed.

Gummy Bear said:

Agreed.
By the look of your system (i.e. you could eat your dinner off it) I'd probably rule out dirty slots as well.

You could be looking at a broken trace or two.

That would be bogus indeed.

Click to expand...

Any starting points on where I should be looking for cut traces? The edge connector looks clean but I thought it may have something to do with it, but who knows...

Any pointers on what to look for on the board would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

praedicator said:

Any starting points on where I should be looking for cut traces? The edge connector looks clean but I thought it may have something to do with it, but who knows...

Any pointers on what to look for on the board would be greatly appreciated, thanks!

Click to expand...

I really wouldn't know for sure. The 2F is the only multislot board I have never owned (and it's the most common. Funny old thing...)

If it suffers from the same flex fatigue that the six slot does, it could be anywhere.
Look for any obvious cuts or marks on both sides of the board, look for any bad solder joints.

Other than that, I'm afraid I'm out of ideas.
I took some fairly major preventative surgery on my 6F to make sure I never had to deal with broken traces.

Perhaps someone who knows more about the 2F will decide to reply, you never know.


Good luck, mate. Sorry I wasn't more help.

The video blocking also occurs when I'm in the UniBIOS menu. Would this eliminate the cart slots from the possible sources of this problem?

Sounds like the text ROM area. Dang, cant remmeber which rom has the trest stored, the L0 is the sprite scaler, program is exactly that, sm1 is the sound one, so there is one other eprom or mask rom which is text...

Ah yes, the FIX rom! You have your problem in its circuits.

the FIX is the text proper. Ascii character 20 is the clear space to allow graphics to show through. So any corruption or read on this would keep things messed up....

Nightmare Tony said:

Sounds like the text ROM area. Dang, cant remmeber which rom has the trest stored, the L0 is the sprite scaler, program is exactly that, sm1 is the sound one, so there is one other eprom or mask rom which is text...

Ah yes, the FIX rom! You have your problem in its circuits.

the FIX is the text proper. Ascii character 20 is the clear space to allow graphics to show through. So any corruption or read on this would keep things messed up....

Click to expand...

Good knowledge, Tony.

If this is indeed his problem, how would he fix it?

Yes, how would I fix it?

I cant seem to see your pictures but this still sounds like a cart socket problem to me as the unibios dosent get tiles from the onboard tiles with a multislot.

Raz

Sorry about the pics, they got moved to a different folder on my web site and I forgot to update the links. They should be all fixed now.

Razoola said:

this still sounds like a cart socket problem to me

Raz

Click to expand...

That's what I said Raz, but does anyone listen to me?

What can he do to check the cart connectors?
Give them a jolly good cleaning?