The Disaster Thread

I've not found something similar on the forums, so here it goes...
This is kinda sick, but here we can post pics of various board disasters, like corrosion, burning, etc

Here it goes a massive corrosion:


Another (trying to clean it?):


And the Metal Slug "volcano version":

Those pictures are killing me! Just heart-wrenching I tell ya...

The Metal Slug one is just WTF though. How the hell did that happen??

See, I knew those Altera Max ICs were trouble. I still think SNK got a bad batch. MSX is the cart that dies most often. I'm gonna see if I can find a replacement and swap it in and see if it works.

...damn! That's a major bummer.

Come on, no one has any sad history to tell? E.g. a board someone sent you for repair and when you saw it you said WOW!
Post your pic here!

Omega Race board, with bad battery acid corrosion:



Ausie flooding, Australia. Take a look and you'll see some neo stuff there:

Altera "stripper":


Does Altera have quality control?????

Thread? How about a site - something like the videogame equivalent of Wrecked Exotics?

Shocking pictures, kind of glad I don't have any to share!

Xian Xi said:

See, I knew those Altera Max ICs were trouble. I still think SNK got a bad batch. MSX is the cart that dies most often. I'm gonna see if I can find a replacement and swap it in and see if it works.

Click to expand...

No news on this side, I guess... It's a shame that carts die so easily.

distropia said:

No news on this side, I guess... It's a shame that carts die so easily.

Click to expand...

It would be good if there was a way to bypass the Altera Max chip on MSX.

Xian Xi said:

See, I knew those Altera Max ICs were trouble. I still think SNK got a bad batch. MSX is the cart that dies most often. I'm gonna see if I can find a replacement and swap it in and see if it works.

Click to expand...

Not likely, since it's a FPGA and needs to be programmed with the proper logic.

da66en said:

Not likely, since it's a FPGA and needs to be programmed with the proper logic.

Click to expand...

Yup. And the FPGA code is hardware protected, it is impossible to read.
A solution could be to swap the roms to another Prog board, but probably don't work due to code encryption. So no solution at this time, I'll keep my mountain of dead carts.

distropia said:

Yup. And the FPGA code is hardware protected, it is impossible to read.
A solution could be to swap the roms to another Prog board, but probably don't work due to code encryption. So no solution at this time, I'll keep my mountain of dead carts.

Click to expand...

distropia said:

Yup. And the FPGA code is hardware protected, it is impossible to read.
A solution could be to swap the roms to another Prog board, but probably don't work due to code encryption. So no solution at this time, I'll keep my mountain of dead carts.

Click to expand...

If you have a spare PROGBK1 from a boot or something you can move all the ROMs over and burn a new P1 with protection removed. MAME patches out the protection when it loads MSX so that work is already done. Not as nice as fixing up the original board with original P1 but it's an option.

Another option is to use the original MSX board with the MAME P1, pull the MAX out, bridge the P1 <-> cart edge traces since the MAX sits between them, then add some circuit to do banking and P2 enabling. It does those on top of the actual protection from what I remember when I poked around my own cart. No idea what that chip in the top center is supposed to do or if it will get in the way of this approach. My cart will probably explode at some point so I'll look into it whenever that happens.

e: just had a look at MAME's patch and it only patches out some of the problem code. More work would be needed for this plan to work.