repairing fatal fury 3 mvs cart.

i got 10 mvs carts recently all not working and as something to do i wanted to fix them and learn as much as i could about how they work.
so far i fixed half of them by retinning the contacts as they were so oxidized i dont think i had any other options. and by repairing damaged traces.

all i get is the crosshatch and all of the other games ive retinned so far all start with sprite or small audio errors.

ive narrowed it down to the prog board and finally down to the chips by putting street hoop chips into the board and it running.

so i got a top3000 programmer and tried reading from the chips and so far i can only dump the sp2. p1, v1, v2 and v3 have legs that wont read. so i downloaded the rom and compared the sp2 to the one i dumped and its not the same, i then dumped a street hoops c1 and then flashed it to an eprom and tried it and it worked, am i missing something do i have to prepare the roms before flashing or did i just get a bad dump?



thanks for reading, i may be back with more questions for other carts i want to fix .

The basic troubleshoot would be: if the cart throws crosshatch, it's because the neogeo is not loading the program, therefore it's having issues with the P chips, either bad traces or the chips themselves. If it has corrupted sprites, it's C roms. No audio at all, the M1 chip. Corrupted audio, V chips or maybe the SMC chip on the prog board (forgot the name) and if the problem is in the fixed layer (health bars, text, etc.) then the S chip may be the issue. Of course, this is all assuming you are 100% sure the issue is the cart and not the neogeo or other component.

Regards.

thanks, ive figured that stuff out already the problem im having is im not sure about programming the roms.
the sp2 file i dumped from fatal fury 3 doesnt match the one in the rom i downloaded.
i then downloaded a few different ones and compared and they were all the same, so instead of programming all the roms just to test i dumped the c1 off street hoop and compared to a street hoop rom i downloaded and it wasnt the same either.

i then programmed 2 roms one with the downloaded one and one with the file i dumped, the one i dumped worked and the rom i downloaded didnt work, it had glitched sprites as i thought it would.

my question is what am i doing wrong?

juci said:

thanks, ive figured that stuff out already the problem im having is im not sure about programming the roms.
the sp2 file i dumped from fatal fury 3 doesnt match the one in the rom i downloaded.
i then downloaded a few different ones and compared and they were all the same, so instead of programming all the roms just to test i dumped the c1 off street hoop and compared to a street hoop rom i downloaded and it wasnt the same either.

i then programmed 2 roms one with the downloaded one and one with the file i dumped, the one i dumped worked and the rom i downloaded didnt work, it had glitched sprites as i thought it would.

my question is what am i doing wrong?

Click to expand...

Which programmer are you using, and which EPROMs are you using for which chips? I use a TOP3000, and differente EPROMs depending on the chip to replace, and everything seems to work fine.

Regards.

i have a top3000, and i have a few m27c322 eproms. i may buy a few different sizes as you cant replace the v chips with 32 bit.
i burned a unibios the other day and it worked fine.

bump, any help would be appreciated.

i gave this a rest for awhile but recently gave it another shot, i burned p1 to the right eeprom and it worked.
first thing i noticed was it had bad audio, i read v1 and found that half the legs were bad, and then split a v1 rom and burnt it to 2 m27c160 eeproms.
apparently v chips wont work in m27c320 eeproms, i put the them in v1 and v2 and moved the original v2 and v3 to v3 and v4 and then changed the jumpers.
when i booted it up the audio isnt right, obviously the jumpers arent set right.

could anyone give me a hand with the jumpers please?

jumpers i changed were:
JV11 to JV7
JV12 to JV8
JV9 to JV13
and just bridged JV10

what am i missing?

The original V1 and V2 ROMs are 32Mbit, V3 is 16Mbit. You now have V1 and V2 as 16Mbit, V3 as 32Mbit and V4 as 16Mbit.

The jumpers for each V ROM on the PROGBK1 set whether the ROM is 32Mbit or 16Mbit and under.

So you should set the jumpers like this:

JV7 ON
JV8 ON
JV13 ON
JV10 ON

Leave the others disconnected.

yep thats exactly what i have it set up as, i guess something else is the problem then.

ill report back.

Double check to make sure your EPROMs are good and the soldering is all good, no gobs of flux or other contamination.

The Neo Geo Dev Wiki has a very good article on the PROGBK1. https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=PROGBK1

it may be the flux around the pins ill clean it up.

You could check the 74LS139 to see if it's still working properly. Unfortunately, if worse comes to worse, the PCM chip may be bad, or perhaps has a cold solder joint or two. If the EPROMs are error free, then there's not much else to check besides bad traces, cold solder joints, the 74LS139, the PCM chip and the edge connector.