Samurai Shodown 5: Weird repair job?

mmsadda

Just buy my shit. Seriously. You can call me Susan
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The chips in this thing, if you can see, dont' have the elaborate markings of my older games. Additionally, the top board has the fucking weirdest repair job I've seen in my life. However, I'm thinking this is almost certainly legit, the more I think about it.

DSCF0498.jpg


DSCF0499.jpg
 

arfink

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I'm thinking that looks less like a repair job and more like a bank switching chip. If you look closely, the chip is tied to pins on the V2, V1, and two jumpers, and has all discrete or passive components. It is marked Playmore on said chip, so it *should* be OK. Those boards must be amazingly expensive if they can't redesign them to put the bankswitching onboard.

I think it's for bankswitching because I have seen this kind of stunt pulled before, but mostly for much older supercomputer or mainframe hardware so that they could address more RAM or ROM than the board was supposed to be able to handle.
 

mmsadda

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QUOTE=arfink;2681315] I'm thinking that looks less like a repair job and more like a bank switching chip. If you look closely, the chip is tied to pins on the V2, V1, and two jumpers, and has all discrete or passive components. It is marked Playmore on said chip, so it *should* be OK. Those boards must be amazingly expensive if they can't redesign them to put the bankswitching onboard.

I think it's for bankswitching because I have seen this kind of stunt pulled before, but mostly for much older supercomputer or mainframe hardware so that they could address more RAM or ROM than the board was supposed to be able to handle. [/QUOTE]

Gotcha. Care to give me the 20-second lesson on banking switches, what they do, and why they'd use one in a SSV cart? And PS, the Bank Switching board actually has SNK/Playmore written on it, which seems to me a surefire sign that it's legit.

That's definitely a legit cart.
Thanks! I thought so, but the chips are marked less than what I'm used to and the bank switching chip is not something I'm familar with in the least.
That said, the chips are marked effectively the same (if less) than older legit MVS chips, the bank switch board is stamped SNKP, and everything else about the cart seems kosher from the label to the sotter joints.
 

chewurface

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Yeah, I've got 3 or 4 of the newer MVS that have that little PCB in them...and they also have chips without Toshiba or anything on them, just the NGH numbers and the marking that corresponds to the spot on the board where they go.

100% legit cart, do not worry.

[edit]
Like the other poster said, bank switching is a tech used to allow the neo to access carts with more megs of ROM memory than it was designed to handle. Like they put half the game on one bank of memory and the other half on a second bank, each bank being within the limits of the neo hardware, and then switch between the two while loading data in to RAM.

It's a simple description, but not being an engineer it's the best I can do.
 
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Neo Alec

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That's not a repair. That's how they're all made.
 

mmsadda

Just buy my shit. Seriously. You can call me Susan
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Yeah, I've got 3 or 4 of the newer MVS that have that little PCB in them...and they also have chips without Toshiba or anything on them, just the NGH numbers and the marking that corresponds to the spot on the board where they go.

100% legit cart, do not worry.

[edit]
Like the other poster said, bank switching is a tech used to allow the neo to access carts with more megs of ROM memory than it was designed to handle. Like they put half the game on one bank of memory and the other half on a second bank, each bank being within the limits of the neo hardware, and then switch between the two while loading data in to RAM.

It's a simple description, but not being an engineer it's the best I can do.

I'm not an engineer; that description was PERFECT for my purposes. Thanks!
 

Hewitson

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That said, the chips are marked effectively the same (if less) than older legit MVS chips, the bank switch board is stamped SNKP, and everything else about the cart seems kosher from the label to the sotter joints.
Sotter??
 

Kyuusaku

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arfink said:
I'm thinking that looks less like a repair job and more like a bank switching chip.
Considering how it only contains a few transistors and appears to operate on one signal.. uh, I don't think so ;) Bankswitching requires at the very least a register and address decoder. This definitely is a repair, probably to fix a mistake with the ASIC. There's not much digital that can be made with three transistors, just a discrete CMOS inverter (though I don't see how that is cost effective). Perhaps the big one is unused or it makes a tri-state inverter or a whole different gate if resistors are populated on the board... To figure out what it is and what it fixes, someone'd need to trace the signals (I don't have a cart with it). The blue wires connect to +5V and GND. I think the white will connect to an ASIC pin and the brown/red to a ROM control signal. Whatever it does, it's nothing ground breaking, only fixing an analog transmission issue (buffer), or to fix a logical issue (simple logic gate).
 

chewurface

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Whatever it is, it is in a cart that I bought brand new, so it was done at the factory before the cart went on the market.
 
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