No Response from Sunset Riders, thoughts?
So a friend of mine was helping us pick tournament games i am going to hold at a party soon and it reminded him that he had a stack of snes games at home some where.
well he found them and long story short he tried one of them, Sunset Riders, and he just got a blank screen. he did say the system was under a thick layer of dust.
He brought it to me today at work and its beat and dirty, the pins are moderatly well worn and were very dirty, some thing had been spilled on it, label on the back was missing chunks and lots of scratches on the label on the front.
heavily used. i'll post pics if i ever remember to get them off of my phone.
i get home crack it open and thankfully, what ever had been spilled on it didnt make it inside the cart so the PCB looks good, no broken traces. the connector was worse than i thought, heavily worn, after scrubbing it with a hi polymer eraser i noticed that where the cartridge made contact with the connector it no longer had any more gold plating in places, but it wasnt corroded and there was plenty of metal left to make a decent connection. all solder points have continuity and none are cold broken or loose.
i tried it in 7 different systems and he tried it in his and its the same thing. just a plain black screen, my PVM shows NTSC when i turn it on so its getting video but its just not initialzing the rom.
to be safe i took some metal polish, its Malco metal polish just for cleaning and removing contaminates from the surface (see ultra fine, not any thing like brasso), and buffed it to be sure and retested on all 7 systems and the same result.
after testing on one system i would pop in a super GB to make sure the system was working and SGB worked just fine each time.
normally i just dive into things like this but considering it, 1 not my game and 2 its not a cheap one to replace i thought i would get a seccond opinion.
my initial thoughts are that its a dead CIC, but a small part of me thinks it could be that stupid little cap insider there too.
i've seen bad mask roms and they are usually a scrambled mess or dont output any video at all but this shows up NTSC on my stuff so its seeing something.
well he found them and long story short he tried one of them, Sunset Riders, and he just got a blank screen. he did say the system was under a thick layer of dust.
He brought it to me today at work and its beat and dirty, the pins are moderatly well worn and were very dirty, some thing had been spilled on it, label on the back was missing chunks and lots of scratches on the label on the front.
heavily used. i'll post pics if i ever remember to get them off of my phone.
i get home crack it open and thankfully, what ever had been spilled on it didnt make it inside the cart so the PCB looks good, no broken traces. the connector was worse than i thought, heavily worn, after scrubbing it with a hi polymer eraser i noticed that where the cartridge made contact with the connector it no longer had any more gold plating in places, but it wasnt corroded and there was plenty of metal left to make a decent connection. all solder points have continuity and none are cold broken or loose.
i tried it in 7 different systems and he tried it in his and its the same thing. just a plain black screen, my PVM shows NTSC when i turn it on so its getting video but its just not initialzing the rom.
to be safe i took some metal polish, its Malco metal polish just for cleaning and removing contaminates from the surface (see ultra fine, not any thing like brasso), and buffed it to be sure and retested on all 7 systems and the same result.
after testing on one system i would pop in a super GB to make sure the system was working and SGB worked just fine each time.
normally i just dive into things like this but considering it, 1 not my game and 2 its not a cheap one to replace i thought i would get a seccond opinion.
my initial thoughts are that its a dead CIC, but a small part of me thinks it could be that stupid little cap insider there too.
i've seen bad mask roms and they are usually a scrambled mess or dont output any video at all but this shows up NTSC on my stuff so its seeing something.
Comments
I'm on my phone. Does boot good or what ever it was called have a database for SNES games and what might be a compatible board swap?
Although if i have continuity where i need it in thinking a board swap wouldn't be necessary
http://www.snescentral.com/system.php
http://www.snescentral.com/pcbboards.php?chip=SHVC-1A0N-20
wonder which ones cheapest. i'll just keep an eye out when I am up in salem/Portland next week
been too busy to work on it till today.
after work I came home around 9:30pm thinking it would be a simple swap since its given me the same problem as with other games and it was bad CIC but not so much.
swap the CIC on the cart, no change. so I start going over all the solder points double checking for cold or broken joints I cant see since they are all dull in color.
that's when I come across a lifted pad, like lifted from the factory. I thought that cant be it, it had continuity. but sure enough, tested the resistance between the leg and the next point on the PCB and it was through the roof.
all the pads were the same dull silver color so it wasn't any thing that was done after, it was also all way to consistent to have been a job done by hand so my guess is that it made a good connection and over time with all the temperature changes, abuse and flexing that it finally pulled too high and caused a no boot.
I just used a leg from a component, heated it up to poke through the sealant on the via and ran some solder over it so it would wick though and made a connection there and bent it over to the leg and soldered it on.
I tried scraping the sealer over the via off but I was too afraid of separating another trace since I couldn't find my precision knife set, but it worked.