bobrocks95
n00b
- Joined
- Dec 16, 2021
- Posts
- 18
So I figure best is short story first, long story second. This is a Timeharvest consolized MV-1C board.
My CMVS crashed while playing Metal Slug, and now gives me pink/cyan/neon green garbage on boot, cart or not. This is the type of screen I was getting:
Emailing JNX to ask about purchasing a diagnostic BIOS, he and someone on the shmups forum both told me pink garbage meant it was likely a BIOS issue. I have a NeoBiosMasta VMC that I installed, and the system was working before I installed it and after I installed it.
I took off the VMC, popped out the UniBios chip from its socket, reseated it and checked continuity between the chip's pins and the socket, cleaned the CPU pins with some CRC electronics cleaner and Qtips, cleaned up whatever fibers were left, and reseated the VMC a few times, same thing.
I removed the VMC, undid the pin 10 & 12 lifts and wire on the original BIOS chip, and got different garbage each boot (a solid blue screen, solid gross shade of yellow screen, some flickering 1-pixel dots flying up the screen), but still nothing.
So I'm kind of at a loss now. I can take pictures of what I'm seeing with the original chip reconnected if that's helpful. Maybe I didn't get the pins back down properly, but there are vias they go straight to and a continuity test checked out. I'm suspicious about this still being just a BIOS issue, which takes us to the long story:
This is the second MV-1C board I've had in this Timeharvest unit. The first one started to show graphical glitches on games (sprites being like one off, d's becoming e's and all that), then rapidly got worse and worse until finally it wouldn't boot at all. The modder I sent it to said they hooked up diagnostic BIOS and told me the CPU was fried, so I bought a whole new MV-1C for it.
I thought at the time that it was because I used a 151 multicart for a whole 10 minutes on it once... I'm wary about 3.3V flash and I figured it was just my luck that others use those carts all the time, but I pop one in literally to test it before selling it and my console dies.
But now the Timeharvest may have killed another MV-1C, and that's where I get officially suspicious. Is the cheap power brick it came with supplying the proper voltage to the unit? Is the step-down converter circuit I see near the JAMMA connector getting anywhere close to 5V? I don't even know how to start testing these things, but I have a multimeter and at this point am so desperate for answers I want to find some smoking gun because no way I'm that unlucky.
Do Timeharvest units have any well-known problems I should look for?
Thank you for reading, sorry to make this my first post and for it to be so long-winded.
My CMVS crashed while playing Metal Slug, and now gives me pink/cyan/neon green garbage on boot, cart or not. This is the type of screen I was getting:
Emailing JNX to ask about purchasing a diagnostic BIOS, he and someone on the shmups forum both told me pink garbage meant it was likely a BIOS issue. I have a NeoBiosMasta VMC that I installed, and the system was working before I installed it and after I installed it.
I took off the VMC, popped out the UniBios chip from its socket, reseated it and checked continuity between the chip's pins and the socket, cleaned the CPU pins with some CRC electronics cleaner and Qtips, cleaned up whatever fibers were left, and reseated the VMC a few times, same thing.
I removed the VMC, undid the pin 10 & 12 lifts and wire on the original BIOS chip, and got different garbage each boot (a solid blue screen, solid gross shade of yellow screen, some flickering 1-pixel dots flying up the screen), but still nothing.
So I'm kind of at a loss now. I can take pictures of what I'm seeing with the original chip reconnected if that's helpful. Maybe I didn't get the pins back down properly, but there are vias they go straight to and a continuity test checked out. I'm suspicious about this still being just a BIOS issue, which takes us to the long story:
This is the second MV-1C board I've had in this Timeharvest unit. The first one started to show graphical glitches on games (sprites being like one off, d's becoming e's and all that), then rapidly got worse and worse until finally it wouldn't boot at all. The modder I sent it to said they hooked up diagnostic BIOS and told me the CPU was fried, so I bought a whole new MV-1C for it.
I thought at the time that it was because I used a 151 multicart for a whole 10 minutes on it once... I'm wary about 3.3V flash and I figured it was just my luck that others use those carts all the time, but I pop one in literally to test it before selling it and my console dies.
But now the Timeharvest may have killed another MV-1C, and that's where I get officially suspicious. Is the cheap power brick it came with supplying the proper voltage to the unit? Is the step-down converter circuit I see near the JAMMA connector getting anywhere close to 5V? I don't even know how to start testing these things, but I have a multimeter and at this point am so desperate for answers I want to find some smoking gun because no way I'm that unlucky.
Do Timeharvest units have any well-known problems I should look for?
Thank you for reading, sorry to make this my first post and for it to be so long-winded.