CPS-2 Powaaaah!

I've got a CPS-2 A board and a couple Bs now, and I have them hooked up in only the most basic configuration. They boot, so they aren't dead, which is great.

Audio on one B board is non-existent, and I am pretty sure that I need to go into the test menu config to fix that, but I've got no controller hooked up just yet.

However, both boards have kind of flaky video so far. The luma is clear, although the image is somewhat wavy at the left and right sides of the screen, but the chroma is either blasted out in the wrong colors or you've just got a black and white image.

I've seen similar effects when playing a PAL video tape on an NTSC video deck back in the day.

Do CPS-2 boards have some sort of video mode setting in the test menu?

Alternately, am I just not running enough amps into the board? My ghetto PC PSU can run 30 Amps out on the +5v, but I've only got one +5v lead connected to the harness. Would I get more amps by connecting additional +5v leads to the harness?

Another possibility is that the A board is just shot, I guess? I checked the B boards to verify that the ROMs were all set properly in their various sockets and the connection between the A and B board seems to be solid.

Honestly, you should have +5V going to all 4 pins (3,4,C,D)

Xian Xi said:

Honestly, you should have +5V going to all 4 pins (3,4,C,D)

Click to expand...

Good call, I'll give that a shot this evening then, and hopefully I'll have a positive result.

Also you might wanna open up the A board. I had one board that was like yours and it turned out that there was some weird corrosion on the inside right before the jamma edge so I had to make some bridges.

It's caseless already, I'll see what I can find on a visual inspection.

I'm not seeing any bad traces or corrosion near the jamma connector on the A board.

I started by just going in and actually soldering the jamma harness that I have to the power supply and video encoder board (previously they had been connected with crimp connectors).

That did quite a bit to improve things across the board. I'm now getting much more correct colors on the CPS boards and better red definition on the MVS too actually, so I'm happy about that. The Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo board seems to need to warm up a little bit and then the colors clean up. That's odd, but the first run through the attract mode is a little weird, and later ones are good.

I do still have some waviness on the left side of the screen and the occasional roll over when there is a screen blank.

The +5v has one lead from the power supply, but is kind of bail connected to all four necessary pins on the jamma connector (it's all basically tied together with solder, this was a pre-wired connector).

Would I get any conceivable improvement (more amps = more good maybe) by connecting one of the other +5v leads from the power supply to this glob?

Tomorrow's project (or Friday, not sure yet, I'm going out tomorrow evening, but I don't know how late) is getting a controller hooked up so that I can actually do something to configure the boards once I'm in the test menu. (I didn't have a whole lot of time tonight because I've had some doctors appointments this whole week, I'm a sicky).

Oh, yeah, and so that I can actuall PLAY A FREAKING GAME.

Just wanted to add a couple pointers to some other threads that I've found enlightening about my video irregularities on the CPS-2 on my Phillips TV and a neobitz-S.

Someone else was having similar irregularities on other boards with a similar setup:

http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthread.php?p=2218287#post2218287

And someone noted that the CPS boards have funky sync levels compared to MVS here:

http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthread.php?t=162850&highlight=cps

So, it looks like the answer to my problems is likely a jrok sync cleaner, as discussed in the first link. However, if you have a shit-tastic mickey mouse harness setup, I would advise going in and fixing that up, because I've got a much nicer picture even out of my MVS now.

This is a ways out, but I did want to just post and confirm that the jrok sync separator, installed between the game board and the encoder board did indeed fix my problems. I still have a slight bit of roll on flash (this could just be a weird side effect and not a problem at all actually) during the attract mode, but the colors are clean even immediately on boot on CPS-2 games, and there are no issues while I actually playing. I've tested one of the vs. games, SSF2X, and VS3.

I actually had been under the impression that the replacement power supply that I hooked up to replace my busted one was also busted. I was pretty surprised when I plugged it in, flipped the switch, and found that it was working tonight.

Maybe I just didn't have it plugged in before? Hm...that would be just like an idiot such as myself.