Rather odd MVS problem

I'm having problems with two of my carts, I checked both of them to make sure they were not boots and they aren't. I'm using a MV-1F board with mono sound setting.

First off - Samurai Showdown 3. The left player on character select canNOT select a character. They are forced to pick Haohmaru. When the Slash/Bust option comes up, you can pick between the two, but it becomes non-responsive again when picking your skill tier. When actual combat starts up, everything is all good. The operator also shows no issues when testing the stick (no sticking, no rapid shooting)

Next one - King of Fighters 2000. Again a left player issue, but at least it's something that can be lived with. When you go to pick a character, the cursor flies about as if it's on rapid fire. Same thing with it's operator, nothing shows abnormalities. All my other carts (Metal Slug/Art of Fighting/Samurai Showdown 1/2 work perfectly fine). Anyone have any idea what's going on?

Is it only on these two carts? Do other carts work fine?

At the very least I'd give both carts' contacts a good cleaning, maybe consider cleaning the slot contacts too:

http://www.hardmvs.com/html/cleaning.htm
http://www.hardmvs.com/html/slotCleaning.htm

Good step by steps if you've never done it.

If everything is clean, and/or it happens on other carts, maybe check your harness / joy hookups, could be something strange going on there.

I haven't tried the eraser trick on them yet but I can give that a go. Yeah it's just those two... they are newer games so could it be a bios issue? I'm almost certain it's not the JAMMA because of the control test in the operator saying they're fine but I could be missing something

When in doubt, clean the boards. It's like rebooting a PC when you have problems. Really should be the de-facto first step, imo. Also, have to checked to make sure these aren't boots? It's really odd that it's just the left player that's getting messed up.

I wouldn't think a bios issue would cause this, but I wouldn't say conclusively. Are you using the standard bios or uni?

using a stock MVS. Both carts were checked and I didn't see any ROM chips that didn't belong soo I'll go give the eraser thing a try and see what happens.

It can be a thing of the DipSwitches connections... Are the communication dipswitches on ?

all three of them are set to off (4/5/6). Do I need to flip all three on or what?

bah, cart cleaning and changing those dips didn't work. Any other ideas?

TougaKiryuu said:

bah, cart cleaning and changing those dips didn't work. Any other ideas?

Click to expand...

Are you sure the games aren't boots? Why don't you open up the carts again and snap some pictures of the boards so we can see them.

Try Clearing the Back up Ram memory..

Do you have other carts that work 100%

It sounds to me like an input resistor array cracked causing intermittent probs maybe.

Also check your Player 2 start button microswitch and make sure you don't have it wired as push to open circuit.

chris1 said:

Try Clearing the Back up Ram memory..

Click to expand...

Try this first. It sometimes works by doing something so simple.

picture time!





no problems with the wiring save a couple tape jobs.



dirty neo geo do it maybe?



samsho 3 boards.


edit: I just caught that the coin mech was wired wrong. Fixed that but the issue is still there.

double post for epic lolz.

I noticed something else from my photos. DIPS 2 and 3 were on.. so I checked the instructions to see what they did... which the 16 pages of near uselessness told me nothing. So I experimented. Turned them both off. The problem went away.... and so did my sound. Ok. Switched 3 back on.. problem came back, but my sound didn't. (Lesson of the day: Switch 3 is a no-no) Reversed it, works like a champ. I appreciate the help and this can be locked/whatever it is you guys do with answered threads.

Good to see you got it sorted and that it was something simple. Thanks for posting what the problem was. There are a lot of people who have probs but never post what fixed it!