Blocky 8x8 tile layer on KoF'97 MVS cart

Got a copy of KoF'97 free with a box full of 'non-working' MVS boards I am intent on fixing up...

Game works fine, except that the 8x8 tile layer (Text, small chara portraits, KoF logo during demo, etc.) is all blocky and mostly unreadable.

What chip(s) contain this data? Where should I be looking for a problem on the board?

Err, nevermind... Before I even got this posted, I spotted a problem and managed to fix it.

My soldering skills are made of fail and I've never done PCB repair before, but I managed to jumper the two cut traces going from pins 11 and 12 of the 'S1' ROM to vias under the NEO-273.

Anyway, decided to go ahead and finish posting this even though I fixed it, in case anyone else has such a problem. (Will add links to pictures later, if anyone wants them.)

Good going on fixing the cart

(Will add links to pictures later, if anyone wants them.)

That would be Great!!!

I once had that with a dirty cart slot...

Thought I was trippin.

Okay, pictures!

Here's an example of the problem, courtesy of Kawaks and Photoshop.

(Except with the actual problem, the original palette colors are preserved, but I couldn't be bothered to perfectly reproduce it!)


The damage to the PCB and the fix. I'll probably resolder it later, with thinner wire... All I could find was an old floppy cable, my PATA ribbons are hiding somewhere...


A picture of the lot of boards the KoF'97 cart came from. Can you believe that two of those boards worked right out of the box, and several more have easily-correctable problems?

Oh man, I feel like coughing just from looking at all that dust.

edit: "Numero (I think?), Fecha" on those labels... where exactly did these come from? I'm just curious, if you have a source you want to keep private then don't worry.

Nah, no uber secret source for boards or games. (Yet!) Just some guy on eBay. 'theconnectionking'. It was a lot of 8 non-working boards, and he threw in an extra MV1B and the KoF cart when it took him a while to get the package out. (Honestly, I hadn't really noticed... I mean, I wasn't exactly anxious about a box of supposedly busted boards.) Good guy. Games don't seem like his primary merch though.

I was actually excited to receive a copy of KoF'97, as I didn't have any KoF games yet. (I only got started collecting MVS stuff about a month ago...but no one knows that because for some reason my introduction thread required 'moderator approval' or something, and hasn't shown up yet.)

And yeah, it's all dirty as hell, but considering pretty much all of them power on, and two actually worked, not a bad deal for like $55 + shipping.

Hell, a few more of them might even work after a good cleaning, though I wouldn't bet on it. The ones that don't work primarily suffer from various RAM errors and stuff like that, which- thanks largely to channelmaniac's repair logs -I have some idea where to start trying to fix them.

It was a really good investment for someone who wants to learn to fix up MVS boards.

btw, I'm unfamiliar with the MVS bios, how many different BIOS regions are there? Just Japan, Europe, and USA?