NEOSD MVS Support thread !

Razoola · Nov 28, 2016

@Gadget, I see your reasoning but I think its a bit early to say your NeoSD has a the fault although I agree its a posibility.

Is it possible for example that you can raise the voltage slighty so your at say 5.02v and see if that makes a different on your MV-1FZ?

On a 4 slot it should goto the crosshatch if a game is not found. If its cycling though the green boot screen then there is something causing the 4slot to reset before the crosshatch displays. To be honest though I am not 100% sure if the NeoSD has been tested on a 4 or 6 slot yet so wait for neosd to respond about that. As far as I know it was tested on a 2 slot but those work differently than 4 and 6 slots.

I think what is needed is a few people with a MV-1FZ to load the main kof2003 set onto their NeoSD and then do the unibios crc32 check a few times and confirm it always passes.

neosd · Nov 28, 2016

Hello,

Don´t worry, if this is a hardware fault we can send you a replacement in advance.

It would be great anyways if you can try it into another mv1fz.

Thanks for your time

GadgetUK said:
Just a quick update - I think its a fault on the cart! Well, I am guessing so at this stage - I need to do more testing at lunch tomorrow (working in morning), but I went through a tonne of pain getting my 4 slot out of storage and wired up just now. It doesn't boot AT ALL on the 4 slot. I tested the 4 slot - just as a sanity check, with several games, including 161 in 1 and the 4 slot works perfectly with all 4 slots. The Neo SD on its own in ANY of the 4 slots just results in the standard green screen with blocks with a reset as it steps through each slot looking for a cart.

What is interesting is how the MV1FZ can have these wierd problems yet the 4 slot wont even boot it =|

Just now I spent 20 minutes examing the board with high magnification, I see a couple of minor manufacturing glitches but they are so minor (and not on the right part of the PCB) that I fail to see how they could cause the fault. I've moved the serial number stickers onto ground plane areas of the board, just to make sure those weren't providing some capacitance to underlying traces (paper does act as a capacitor, although unlikely I wanted to rule it out), but that made no difference. If I was to speculate I would think that there's a very small solder bridge somewhere (where I dont know), or some flux or something perhaps providing some capacitance between pins on a chip.

I guess once I've tested it again tomorrow the next step would be for me to send it back to you guys to take a look at and see if you can work out WTF is going on with it lol. I just KNEW something was going to go wrong with this order - you know when you get so excited and hyped for something and you CANNOT WAIT for it to arrive, that's just a recipe for disaster imho!!! Murphy pops out and throws some unexpected problem at you, and all because you were super excited and thought your dreams had come true lol.

I will upload another video tomorrow, just so everything is clear so far. Hats off to you guys for being so supportive today! And that lines fix did work a treat, so no one else should have the wierd sh** that I've had lol

Yes thanks!!! You were spot on as always, the SVC hang was indeed BRAM needing reset!

GadgetUK · Nov 28, 2016

Razoola said:
@Gadget, I see your reasoning but I think its a bit early to say your NeoSD has a the fault although I agree its a posibility.

Is it possible for example that you can raise the voltage slighty so your at say 5.02v and see if that makes a different on your MV-1FZ?

On a 4 slot it should goto the crosshatch if a game is not found. If its cycling though the green boot screen then there is something causing the 4slot to reset before the crosshatch displays. To be honest though I am not 100% sure if the NeoSD has been tested on a 4 or 6 slot yet so wait for neosd to respond about that. As far as I know it was tested on a 2 slot but those work differently than 4 and 6 slots.

I think what is needed is a few people with a MV-1FZ to load the main kof2003 set onto their NeoSD and then do the unibios crc32 check a few times and confirm it always passes.

The voltage is definitely not the problem! For testing I've been using an 8 amp 5v PSU with hardly any ripple. It shows around 5.15v - but that makes no difference vs the original PSU I was using, which again has hardly any ripple. I saw someone a few pages back say they had tested with a 4 slot I think - unless they were talking about KoF2003? With regards to other people testing on an MV1FZ, I agree, but no one else has come forward with the same problem which leaves 2 possibilities. Either the cart or my system is faulty. I know both systems work perfectly with all the other carts I have, I know the power is not a source of the problem, and neither are dirty slots, it leaves nothing but a problem with the cart I think. The 4 slot behaves totally normally with other carts (regards to cross hatch), but I will test more thoroughly tomorrow.

GadgetUK · Nov 28, 2016

neosd said:
Hello,

Don´t worry, if this is a hardware fault we can send you a replacement in advance.

It would be great anyways if you can try it into another mv1fz.

Thanks for your time

Thanks and thanks for all the support with the updates today! The way that forced update works is really well thought out =D

EDIT: I've just managed to spend another 10 minutes looking at the 4 slot - It behaves correct in that without any carts it goes to cross hatch. With any of my other carts in any or all of the slots they work fine.

Tested the Neo SD again (in all 4 slots with no other carts loaded) and it just watchdogs (green screen with blocks and loops around). I then put the Neo SD into the MV1FZ, and changed the mode to Menu, so it boots in to the menu instead of trying to boot KoF2003. Then put the Neo SD back into the 4 slot and the menu came up, but its glichy and can freeze. I managed to program a game on the 4 slot, but when I run it the same problem occurs as did when it had KoF2003 flashed onto it - the green screen with blocks reset. If I leave it doing that reset, occasionally I will see the start of the neo geo splash but then it just resets again.

Voltage is good, 4 slot is rock solid with other games, so my current conclussion is there is a fault with the card. I bet it ends up being something really simple like a single partical of solder or something.

greatfunky · Nov 28, 2016

yep ! 4 slot tested by me yesterday before the update and was working fine .....

GadgetUK · Nov 28, 2016

greatfunky said:
yep ! 4 slot tested by me yesterday before the update and was working fine .....

Thanks for the info, that's good to know!

GadgetUK · Nov 29, 2016

I've closely inspected the boards again and they look fine, but there are a couple of manufacturing glitches (typically these types of things dont cause problems). Now its important to note that I've tested connectivity from the edge to the level shifter and there is a good connection with no shorts on that trace to the pins next to. The copper particals you can see there seem to be on the top of the trace edge (it looks like a break but it isn't, its additional copper), meaning that this trace is close to the trace above. I am wondering if this is influencing some cross talk. It might be useful for neodev to take a look at the video and see if they can work out which bus it would be affecting. It's going to be either the prog bus or v bus but I am not sure without digging through cart edge pin outs and I dont have much time just now. It could be totally unrelated but its the only thing I can see that is worth ruling out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP6WQ946SKs&feature=youtu.be

EDIT: I've just had a quick look at the pinout and I think its related to some of the prog address lines. So maybe that is the problem? I could just take a scalpel to the board to seperate the traces but I don't want to do anything like that to a board thats under warranty. Please let me know what you think, I can post this back if you want. I retested on the 4 slot, still wierd things going on. And one more point that 'might be related, I wiped over that trace with IPA to see if it would clean up and noticed an exception raised when testing KoF2003 on the MV1FZ, so I am wondering if wiping it with a cotton bud has influenced those particals to the point where its now more glitchy? It could all be cooincidence but its strange because I've not had any exceptions at all until wiping that trace with a cotton bud, so part of me thinks that could be the problem.

It might be that the drive levels on the 4 slot are stronger (because of the slot buffering etc), and maybe thats why it doesnt boot at all on the 4 slot?

neosd · Nov 29, 2016

Hello,

Big thanks for the video, we have sent it to the pcbs factory by email and got a call from them 2 minutes ago.

They check with visual inspection machines every pcb before shipping those to the seccond factory that solders the chips and connectors.
Seccond factory gets the pcbs and solder those using stencil, pick and place machines and an oven. Once the boards are soldered they use another visual inspection machine that checks every solder point on the pcb to be sure everything is ok.

Checking how the process works, the pcb has to been damaged on transport, we dont know on which exact transport stage.

Anyways, we think this issue may not be related with your problem at all but we think thats better to ship you a new one tomorrow, this one we will ship you, it will be heavy tested on 4 different MV1FZ boards today, so this way we will know for sure where the issue is.

Once you ship us back your board, we will analyze it aswel to see whats happening there, to close the circle.

Thanks for your time and sorry for the trouble

Also, we are going to pay you the shipping from UK to Spain.

GadgetUK said:
I've closely inspected the boards again and they look fine, but there are a couple of manufacturing glitches (typically these types of things dont cause problems). Now its important to note that I've tested connectivity from the edge to the level shifter and there is a good connection with no shorts on that trace to the pins next to. The copper particals you can see there seem to be on the top of the trace edge (it looks like a break but it isn't, its additional copper), meaning that this trace is close to the trace above. I am wondering if this is influencing some cross talk. It might be useful for neodev to take a look at the video and see if they can work out which bus it would be affecting. It's going to be either the prog bus or v bus but I am not sure without digging through cart edge pin outs and I dont have much time just now. It could be totally unrelated but its the only thing I can see that is worth ruling out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP6WQ946SKs&feature=youtu.be

EDIT: I've just had a quick look at the pinout and I think its related to some of the prog address lines. So maybe that is the problem? I could just take a scalpel to the board to seperate the traces but I don't want to do anything like that to a board thats under warranty. Please let me know what you think, I can post this back if you want. I retested on the 4 slot, still wierd things going on. And one more point that 'might be related, I wiped over that trace with IPA to see if it would clean up and noticed an exception raised when testing KoF2003 on the MV1FZ, so I am wondering if wiping it with a cotton bud has influenced those particals to the point where its now more glitchy? It could all be cooincidence but its strange because I've not had any exceptions at all until wiping that trace with a cotton bud, so part of me thinks that could be the problem.

It might be that the drive levels on the 4 slot are stronger (because of the slot buffering etc), and maybe thats why it doesnt boot at all on the 4 slot?

GadgetUK · Nov 29, 2016

Thanks, very much appreciated!

I don't think that little glitch on the board is the issue tbh. I will wait for the new boards now and hope that works OK.

GadgetUK · Nov 29, 2016

greatfunky said:
yep ! 4 slot tested by me yesterday before the update and was working fine .....

Do you happen to know which 4 slot you have - does it have the old 'pro' chipset, pro-b0 etc, or the newer chipset like the AES 3-x and MV1FZ use?

greatfunky · Nov 29, 2016

GadgetUK said:
Do you happen to know which 4 slot you have - does it have the old 'pro' chipset, pro-b0 etc, or the newer chipset like the AES 3-x and MV1FZ use?

To be honest .... i absolutely don't know , i screwed that board inside one of my cabinets since many years now and it was never opened ( at least by me ).

GadgetUK · Nov 30, 2016

Still not made any progress except that all the other games I've tested seem OK, except for KoF2003 and MS5. I really hope it is a fault on the cart because otherwise I imagine this taking ages to work out the cause =/ I guess if someone else could confirm whether it will boot a game on a 4 slot using the 'pro' chipset that might help. If they can boot games on that 4 slot it would give me confidence that it must be the cart.

I think the most likely explanation at the moment, if there is a fault is perhaps a glitchy level shifter, or a line floating / almost floating somewhere. The suspense is killing me lol.

In the meantime I've got the review video uploading now - I've not included anything about this CRC issue though.

My initial video is here:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv6eYff-fZ0&feature=youtu.be

Gummy Bear · Nov 30, 2016

GadgetUK said:
Does the sytem mode and region options get disabled if you have a unibios? The reason I ask is I noticed on the 4 slot when I boot into the menu its allows region and system changes, but on my 1FZ with the unibios it does not.

Yeah that's normal, man. If the cart detects the unibios it hands those settings over to it.

Sceptre_JLRB · Nov 30, 2016

@neosd
Just an insignificant detail. The gamelist on the NeoSD menu shows "The King of Fighters '95" twice, in addition to "The King of Fighters '95 (AES)". Maybe the repeated one corresponds to kof95a.zip romset, which I think it's called "The King of Fighters '95 (Alternate)" or similar.

neosd · Nov 30, 2016

Hello,

We just have checked it, its a bug on the neobuilder, we will fix it and upload a new version.

BTW, its better to be before, rather than never or smoke

Thanks

Sceptre_JLRB said:
@neosd
Just an insignificant detail. The gamelist on the NeoSD menu shows "The King of Fighters '95" twice, in addition to "The King of Fighters '95 (AES)". Maybe the repeated one corresponds to kof95a.zip romset, which I think it's called "The King of Fighters '95 (Alternate)" or similar.

Sceptre_JLRB · Nov 30, 2016

neosd said:
Hello,

We just have checked it, its a bug on the neobuilder, we will fix it and upload a new version.

BTW, its better to be before, rather than never or smoke

Thanks

Thank you very much!

LOL for 'teh Espanis Drama' :lolz:

Coming back to the interesting affairs, while testing KOF95 I'll observed the horizontal lines glitch, but in a slight fashion, a couple of times. Just turned off the MVS, then on, and they disappeared. Magician Lord also showed them once. Both cases were the same as previously reported by some MV-1FZ/1FZS users, but the horizontal lines seem to appear in a minor way and rarely, being easily eliminated. I'm using an MV-1F board with UniBIOS 3.2 Free, and validated .neo files. Should I also receive the firmware update for this glitch?

neodev · Dec 1, 2016

We can send you the testing firmware that fixes the line glitches. Just send us an email to contact@neosdstore with your serial number. Keep in mind that firmware is not final and contains some WIP features

.

Sceptre_JLRB said:
Thank you very much!

LOL for 'teh Espanis Drama'

Coming back to the interesting affairs, while testing KOF95 I'll observed the horizontal lines glitch, but in a slight fashion, a couple of times. Just turned off the MVS, then on, and they disappeared. Magician Lord also showed them once. Both cases were the same as previously reported by some MV-1FZ/1FZS users, but the horizontal lines seem to appear in a minor way and rarely, being easily eliminated. I'm using an MV-1F board with UniBIOS 3.2 Free, and validated .neo files. Should I also receive the firmware update for this glitch?

Sceptre_JLRB · Dec 1, 2016

neodev said:
We can send you the testing firmware that fixes the line glitches. Just send us an email to contact@neosdstore with your serial number. Keep in mind that firmware is not final and contains some WIP features .

Thank you so much, @neosd & @neodev. Although the glitch rarely appears, I think I'd better install the fix firmware just to prevent.

neosd · Dec 1, 2016

Sceptre_JLRB said:
Thank you so much, @neosd & @neodev. Although the glitch rarely appears, I think I'd better install the fix firmware just to prevent.

Hello,

You got an email.

Its still a beta firmware, we are going release an update with more functions among this fix.
Right now, everyone wanting to try it can contact us, we will send it to anyone wanting to try it. Once download section is fully operative, firmwares will be downloaded from there.

Thanks

Sceptre_JLRB · Dec 1, 2016

Just got and installed the fix firmware. Everything works perfect!
Thanks a lot, also for your prompt and efficient answer. :glee:

GadgetUK · Dec 1, 2016

I noticed earlier that CRC issues happen with Matrimelee as well - random CRC on bank 0 or bank 1, sometimes they come back as NG but usually one gives wrong CRC. What I don't understand is why the problem seems to be related to the last games that used the CHAFIO board. I cannot help but feel that maybe the cart is fine and its some yet undiscovered timing glitch between some MV-1FZ and the implementation of the CHAFIO chipset. Until someone else confirms whether the cart works on a 4 slot using the 'pro' chipset, I have to assume that perhaps it just isn't compatible with my 4 slot, and that is a seperate issue to the problem I am having with the 1FZ.

The behaviour of the seemingly random CRC glitches on MS5, KOF2003 and now Matrimelee lead me to think that it is a timing issue on the CHAFIO chipset implementation, or perhaps a fault there. The kind of behaviour I seem to be seeing would suggest cross talk, or a rarely occuring timing issue, but it results in the same graphical issues in the same place on KoF2003.

The thing that just doesn't add up to a faulty cart is - All the other games I've played that dont use the CHAFIO all work fine, display fine and most importantly they all report a good CRC no matter how many times you run the CRC check. But that's not the case with the 3 games mentioned above. There is an interesting exception to this which might provide another clue - The KoF2003 boot rom on the Neo SD does the same graphical issues and CRC problems, and that I believe does not use the CHAFIO implementation (ie. decryption hardware).

My question to the technical experts here - what is different about those games that could be relevant? Could it be a hard to spot timing issue related to bank switching used on games that use a lot of P ROM. Is it the technique used to swap between P ROM banks? - This might be a question for Raz! When doing the CRC check on say Matrimelee, what is done to swap banks, and when CRC checking a bank what goes on at hardware level regards addressing. Does it just read a sequential address range and toggle a couple of upper address bits to change the bank, or is it more complicated than that?

Razoola · Dec 1, 2016

I am more leaning towards that your neoSD has a fault to be honest but then again I don't know the internal workings of the neo sd so I could be totally wrong. I simply say that atm because noone else is reporting this crc32 issue. Can you put RBFF2 through multiple crc32 check and see if a bank ever fails on that?

Raz

neodev · Dec 1, 2016

GadgetUK said:
I noticed earlier that CRC issues happen with Matrimelee as well - random CRC on bank 0 or bank 1, sometimes they come back as NG but usually one gives wrong CRC. What I don't understand is why the problem seems to be related to the last games that used the CHAFIO board. I cannot help but feel that maybe the cart is fine and its some yet undiscovered timing glitch between some MV-1FZ and the implementation of the CHAFIO chipset. Until someone else confirms whether the cart works on a 4 slot using the 'pro' chipset, I have to assume that perhaps it just isn't compatible with my 4 slot, and that is a seperate issue to the problem I am having with the 1FZ.

The behaviour of the seemingly random CRC glitches on MS5, KOF2003 and now Matrimelee lead me to think that it is a timing issue on the CHAFIO chipset implementation, or perhaps a fault there. The kind of behaviour I seem to be seeing would suggest cross talk, or a rarely occuring timing issue, but it results in the same graphical issues in the same place on KoF2003.

The thing that just doesn't add up to a faulty cart is - All the other games I've played that dont use the CHAFIO all work fine, display fine and most importantly they all report a good CRC no matter how many times you run the CRC check. But that's not the case with the 3 games mentioned above. There is an interesting exception to this which might provide another clue - The KoF2003 boot rom on the Neo SD does the same graphical issues and CRC problems, and that I believe does not use the CHAFIO implementation (ie. decryption hardware).

My question to the technical experts here - what is different about those games that could be relevant? Could it be a hard to spot timing issue related to bank switching used on games that use a lot of P ROM. Is it the technique used to swap between P ROM banks? - This might be a question for Raz! When doing the CRC check on say Matrimelee, what is done to swap banks, and when CRC checking a bank what goes on at hardware level regards addressing. Does it just read a sequential address range and toggle a couple of upper address bits to change the bank, or is it more complicated than that?

I think there could be an issue in your cart, as matrimelee use a plain standard bankswitching. kof2003 and ms5 (and svc) are more timing sensitive, because they are more complicated, but for matrimelee, the address and data are quite slow compared to the hardware speed, and the data is served directly by the flashroms, so it shouldn't be an issue.

Mikekim · Dec 1, 2016

neosd said:
Hello,

Could we send you the first firmware that solves the glitching on the MV-1FZ ?

If so, could you send us an email to contact@neosdstor...... ? with your serial number

Thanks

Downloaded the supplied firmware update and the my MV-1FZ no longer glitches

hope this helps you get the issue fixed

GadgetUK · Dec 1, 2016

Razoola said:
I am more leaning towards that your neoSD has a fault to be honest but then again I don't know the internal workings of the neo sd so I could be totally wrong. I simply say that atm because noone else is reporting this crc32 issue. Can you put RBFF2 through multiple crc32 check and see if a bank ever fails on that?

Raz

Thanks, will do now!

EDIT: No problems with checksum on that game after about 10 checks.

EDIT2: Wow, I noticed last night that if you press SELECT + START in the menu, there's already an option to load and save backup RAM - I missed that in my review video the other day, I will cover that in the follow up video =D

NEOSD MVS Support thread !

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