Fatal Fury Special Japanese boot?

I've had this for a while and it also hasn't been working for a while so I opened it up. Looks like it has had repair done to it or it's a boot. Anyone know?

It looks like the chip layout is different from what's on arcade-collector, but the chips have the same font and writing

Very interesting specimen there, yes it's legitimate.

PROG board has a pair of EPROMs in the EP sockets probably as a bugfix. Notice the still present P2 ROM.

I think what's going on with the CHA board is instead of the usual 3 odd and 3 even C ROMs often found in Fatal Fury Special, which are all 16Mbit, this cart has a pair of 32Mbit C ROMs which has reduced the C ROMs to 2 odd and 2 even. Usually it's cheaper to use two smaller ROMs instead of one big ROM, but I guess this time it's the opposite.

Notice the printing on the C ROMs.

058 - C13
058 - C24
058 - C5
058 - C6

Those first two are C1, C2, C3 and C4 combined. The wires added to the board is because CHA42G-4 doesn't normally support 32Mbit C ROM chips.

Thanks for the awesome info! Now I just need to figure out how to get it working again

Symptom? Is the game not booting? If so, there's a problem with the P ROMs on the PROG board. Could be a dirty edge connector on the board, could be dry and cracked soldering on the P ROMs, or one or more P ROMs has failed or become partially erased like on those EPROMs.

Odd looking cart for sure, but nobody would spend the time to boot such a common game. At least I hope they wouldn't!

SNK has used those blue wires in AES carts before, like King of Fighters 94.

http://www.arcade-collector.com/king-of-fighters-94-neogeo-43#AES-PCB

A couple of different things happen on boot:
1) On startup, junk data flickers on and off the screen.
2) On startup, the NeoGeo logo appears andand the startup sound goes off, but once it's over the game resets and the NeoGeo logo reappears in an endless loop.

EDIT one time it got to the press start screen for a split second before it reset

The issues you're describing are affecting the P (game resets), C (broken graphics), M (music cuts out entirely) and possibly S (fix layer) ROMs. I have a hard time believing all are going bad at once. It's far more likely the cartridge edge connectors are dirty, or your console slot is dirty.

I may have described it badly, but I think the Graphics Rom and Music Rom is fine. The boot screen starts, but once it exits the boot screen the console resets. I think the junk data on screen some times is, as you said, from a bad connection. The audio never has any issues. The boot screen has no graphical issues

If the only constant here is the game resets in the same place, the 68k is crashing on the game code. If you had a UniBIOS, you'd be able to see more details on the crash that happens. The reason the console resets instead of hanging is the same reason we have the click of death, the Neo Geo is designed to automatically re-boot if the 68k crashes. It made the lives of arcade operators easier.

Anyway, what you may want to look into is pulling the P ROMs and replacing them. Placing them into an EPROM programmer, dumping and testing against the MAME dump for Fatal Fury Special would be best, but at worst you can just get both EP1 and EP2 ROMs replaced and see if that helps the game. If not, then turn to the P2 ROM.

The random graphical/musical problems is from dirty connections.

I'll add a Unibios chip to my AES and check if I can find more specific information. Hopefully from there I can figure out which chip(s) I need to replace, buy some new ones and flash them if need be. Thanks for some ideas on where to get started!