Who Can Fix My MVS Cart?

[SignOfGoob]

I have an original Pulstar MVS with crappy sound. Only the samples are fucked, chip tunes seem to play fine, graphics are flawless. It used to “warm up” and be fine but now it never does. I’ve tried a few things but I’m pretty sure it needs a ROM or two. I just want to mail it to someone more competent than me. Who would that person be?

 

[RAZO]

Probably just needs a reflow. Had the same issue on my Pulstar cart and James fixed it.

 

[SignOfGoob]

Reflow of ROMs or other chips?

 

[BIG BEAR]

If you want to send it to somebody,drop me a convo and I will go into detailed instruction then. With an original such as that ,one would hope it's a reflow problem but heavy odds are that you may need a chip replaced...hopefully not.

I offer this service to anybody that lives in the US. Just the carts for now...I'm not in a "fix the MVS or AES system" mode right now...I just don't have the time for systems atm as I am working on other stuff mixed in with real life bullsh8t..I'm all over the place.
Quick turn around time from the receipt of your cart.
BB

 

[HeavyMachineGoob]

So specifically the issue is with the sound? First thing to do is reflow the V ROM chips and the PCM chip on the PROG board.

If that doesn’t fix it, there could be broken solder pads that have separated from the board but are still soldered to the chip pins, this is most common with surface mount chips, like the PCM chip. But, the description of the cartridge working fine after warming up tells me it’s probably just cracked solder joints.

if all those things check out and the sound still has issues, then you look at replacing the V ROM chips. The quick and dirty way to figure out roughly which ones are broken is to load Pulstar in an emulator but swap out one of the V ROM files with an empty dummy file so the chip behaves as if it’s dead. Do this once with every V ROM file and see if any particular chip matches your symptoms.

 

[SignOfGoob]

Yeah, it’s just sound and I’m pretty sure just sample based sounds. The game runs perfectly otherwise. When I got it like 10 years ago it was fine. Then it would get scratchy on startup and clean itself up. Now those affected sounds are either absent or distorted at all times.

That’s very good sounding info. I can attempt to reflow the solder joints on the ROMs but I don’t have an oven so the surface mount stuff I’ll probably stay away from. If simple reflowing doesn’t fix it, I’ll send it to someone. Thanks.

 

[HeavyMachineGoob]

You could send it to big bear, he’d get it sorted out for you in a jiffy.

 

[SignOfGoob]

UPDATE: last night I inspected the PCBs with a lens and found a couple of...what looked like tiny strands of wire sorta semi laying across some of the pins. I removed these and cleaned the entire PCB with alcohol because I remembered that some years ago I was using something to clean PCBs that turned out to cause problems.

I had some issues seating the cart (nothing too bad) so I used Deoxit on the contacts and...it booted and...it runs flawlessly. Perfect sound. Problem solved, I guess. It certainly doesn’t seem to be a ROM problem.

Thanks for everyone’s contributions.

 

[HeavyMachineGoob]

Good to hear it was an easy fix, those are the best.