Anthony Flack
n00b
- Joined
- Oct 1, 2018
- Posts
- 7
Hi folks, another first-time poster here.
I recently restored a gutted arcade cabinet (something I have wanted to own for oh about 35 years now), and needing something to put in it, I bought an MVS from ebay and a 161-in-1 from AliExpress, which seemed like a pretty good place to start.
The MVS turned out to be a MV-1ACH and it isn't in great condition. There are a few scratches on the bottom of the board which might be a potential source of trouble (if not now then in the future), and more worryingly some of the surface-mount capacitors on the bottom seem to have been dinked right off the board and are missing.
It boots, but it's really glitchy. Some games almost work. Most suffer from random crashes, predictable crashes, flickering, missing or incorrect sprites, wrong palettes, corrupted level data or other strange behaviour. It's kind of interesting but very much less than ideal!
Not having a working setup makes it hard to tell exactly what is going wrong although obviously those missing capacitors are not helping matters, but perhaps they aren't the only problem.
I know bad cart connections can cause this kind of behaviour, and the Neo-Geo has the mother of all cart connectors, so I went to town with contact cleaner but that hasn't helped.
The power supply is a new 10A arcade supply, I tried running the +5v a little hotter but that hasn't helped.
The 161-in-1 is a revision 2 - I haven't done the audio mods, but I did bridge the two pins which it was recommended to bridge, but that hasn't helped either.
It's hard to know whether to blame the 161 or the MVS, since I don't have another cart or another system to test against. But since the MVS has actual visibly damaged components, that seems like the most likely culprit.
Thinking perhaps I'd just been unlucky, and before I invest too many hours in trying to fix something I might never get working, I thought well, maybe it would be easiest to just get another one and see how that behaves. Then I hopefully could confirm that the cart isn't faulty. So I bought another MVS from ebay - against my own better judgement it was another MV-1ACH, but they are the only ones who don't charge an arm and a leg for postage to New Zealand.
This one looks to be in a bit better physical shape, although it ALSO has some missing capacitors on the underside. Ugh. I gave it a thorough slot-cleaning and... well, it just sticks on the crosshatch screen. I don't think it sees the cart. With the UniBios in, it goes to the UniBios crosshatch screen, and going from there to the memory monitor produces a page of garbage.
So yes, it's worse than the first one. Wonderful.
Well there's nothing for it now, I can't turn back, I don't want to buy a third one, I guess I'm going to have to try to fix one of these damn things. And I guess the place to start is to replace those missing capacitors which I am sure must be making the system more unstable even if it doesn't seem to have killed it. I have no experience with this titchy surface-mount stuff and don't even know what to replace them with.
Help guys!
I recently restored a gutted arcade cabinet (something I have wanted to own for oh about 35 years now), and needing something to put in it, I bought an MVS from ebay and a 161-in-1 from AliExpress, which seemed like a pretty good place to start.
The MVS turned out to be a MV-1ACH and it isn't in great condition. There are a few scratches on the bottom of the board which might be a potential source of trouble (if not now then in the future), and more worryingly some of the surface-mount capacitors on the bottom seem to have been dinked right off the board and are missing.
It boots, but it's really glitchy. Some games almost work. Most suffer from random crashes, predictable crashes, flickering, missing or incorrect sprites, wrong palettes, corrupted level data or other strange behaviour. It's kind of interesting but very much less than ideal!
Not having a working setup makes it hard to tell exactly what is going wrong although obviously those missing capacitors are not helping matters, but perhaps they aren't the only problem.
I know bad cart connections can cause this kind of behaviour, and the Neo-Geo has the mother of all cart connectors, so I went to town with contact cleaner but that hasn't helped.
The power supply is a new 10A arcade supply, I tried running the +5v a little hotter but that hasn't helped.
The 161-in-1 is a revision 2 - I haven't done the audio mods, but I did bridge the two pins which it was recommended to bridge, but that hasn't helped either.
It's hard to know whether to blame the 161 or the MVS, since I don't have another cart or another system to test against. But since the MVS has actual visibly damaged components, that seems like the most likely culprit.
Thinking perhaps I'd just been unlucky, and before I invest too many hours in trying to fix something I might never get working, I thought well, maybe it would be easiest to just get another one and see how that behaves. Then I hopefully could confirm that the cart isn't faulty. So I bought another MVS from ebay - against my own better judgement it was another MV-1ACH, but they are the only ones who don't charge an arm and a leg for postage to New Zealand.
This one looks to be in a bit better physical shape, although it ALSO has some missing capacitors on the underside. Ugh. I gave it a thorough slot-cleaning and... well, it just sticks on the crosshatch screen. I don't think it sees the cart. With the UniBios in, it goes to the UniBios crosshatch screen, and going from there to the memory monitor produces a page of garbage.
So yes, it's worse than the first one. Wonderful.
Well there's nothing for it now, I can't turn back, I don't want to buy a third one, I guess I'm going to have to try to fix one of these damn things. And I guess the place to start is to replace those missing capacitors which I am sure must be making the system more unstable even if it doesn't seem to have killed it. I have no experience with this titchy surface-mount stuff and don't even know what to replace them with.
Help guys!