Showtime/Blitz 2K Sportstation HDD Trouble

wcatbb

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First time posting, and this is my first cab, so I'm really bummed when my HDD flat out died 2 weeks after bringing it home.

I'm set on converting to CF in the very near future, but I have a couple of 10GB HDDs around, so I figured I'd image over the MAME nbanfl.chd onto one and swap it out for the defective drive. No such luck. I don't even get to the boot loader screen.

I have read up on the pic and rom chip issues, but haven't found exactly what version MAME will work with. Also, I'm using the guide and have successfully written a drive using this URL: http://www.revisionx.com/kiproject/chdman.html

To up the difficulty, I didn't create an image of the drive that came with the cabinet before it failed and the slot where the game/expansion chip goes is pretty much blank. Excuse the pictures, but I took a few quick ones in hopes someone could identify what I need.

When connected and powering up, the LED shows 2 for a few seconds and then quickly cycles numbers 4, 5, d, 8 (sic) and then turns off and back to 2 again.

Any ideas?
 

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I believe the, "2" indicates a theoretically missing drive. Try changing the jumpers on the hard drive and possible re-writting the image after you change it.

Most of the time (like with a Blitz 99 board I had) setting the drive to Single Master works fine. Sometimes however, I notice that hard drives work better in their sort of, compatibility mode. Right around the time 40GB drives came out there were issues with older BIOS chips that couldn't recognize the drive - so sometimes you have to add a jumper to make the drive recognizable to the game board. I know WD drives have this option.
 
Jumper Settings

I'll try the jumper settings, but I know for sure I'll never purchase another Quantum hard drive. The one failed completely and i bought a "new" 10GB off ebay and it was DOA.

I guess I'll take a small victory in the fact that the 10GB Western Digital I'm using now actually spins and powers on...

I feel like I'm flying blind here because the nbanfl.chd won't even load on MAME to begin with, and I haven't heard about anyone successfully getting the chd working on a Sportstation. FRUSTRATION.

Also, just out of curiousity, wouldn't the jumper need to remain in the same slot (master/cable select) from when I flashed the image from my PC? It seems strange to be able to read/write from a PC and not read/write from the Vegas Board when I haven't touched the jumper in between. It's set at master now, but I can switch it to see what happens.
 
LOL. Sportstation/Frustration... sound accurate! :D

I really think there's some missing information with these machines. In my Blitz 99 I copied over the MAME Blitz 99 image using chdman to a new drive and that worked fine, but nothing I try works with the Sportstation. What kills me, absolutely kills me, is that I have an original Quantum drive that works fine! And before I messed with the images I made a backup of the current image on the drive. Wouldn't you know it, chdman messed up my backup image effectively killing my machine. Hopefully someone else who has this game can dump their original hard drive image, in hopes that that is the one we both have.
 
CHDMan

Yikes...that's not good news. Maybe I'll re-try imaging over the chd again using something other than chdman.

While it is free, people seemingly have nothing but trouble getting a good file transfer regardless of the chdman command prompt printing a "success" message. Would something like Norton Ghost work, or is there a preferred alternative imaging program in the KLOV/arcade museum world?

Another thing: Do I have to reformat the HDD every time I attempt to re-image?

Also, if you are interested, I was able to download a Gold (3.0) Sportstation CHD from user Deadly before discovering it wouldn't work with my security PIC/ROM chip. Maybe it will help you, though. You should PM him or me if you need it because I don't think you can get it anywhere else on the net or through MAME.

UPDATE: I was able to get the disk up and running fine, all diagnostic checks pass, but the game freezes and restarts whenever gameplay is about to load (in attract mode and after trying to start a game for both nba and nfl).

I can select a team in nba mode and get to the "tonight's match up" screen, but when entering codes, the game stutters and then finally freezes and re-starts. In nfl, I can get past the enter initials screen, but then after that the screen goes blank and resets before choosing teams.

I suspect that I have the right version and that this isn't a jumper issue, but perhaps the disk drive is too slow or the image is corrupted by chdman? (testing yielded results around 15mb/s average bursts from the Western Digital)

I would hope that it's not an issue with the security chip or ROM version. I read somewhere where someone else with a "Blitz 2000" security chip has the MAME nbanfl.chd up and running fine. So close!
 
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PU Test

Second attempt to image the hard drive tonight didn't solve anything. So far I have tried 2 separate MAME image downloads both loaded from two separate computers and I'm getting the same result.

1st CHD [http://bda.retroroms.net/downloads/mame/CHDs/nbanfl]

chdman - MAME Compressed Hunks of Data (CHD) manager 0.90 (Jan 19 2005)
Input file: nbanfl.chd
Header Size: 120 bytes
File Version: 3
Flags: NO_PARENT, READ_ONLY
Compression: zlib+
Hunk Size: 4096 bytes
Total Hunks: 1052258
Logical size: 4,310,046,720 bytes
MD5: 9e3748957c672f6d7a1e464546f46b15
SHA1: 4256c7487a55fd0d0e4241f595cc886d4402fd7d
Metadata: Tag=47444444 Length=35
CYLS:8908,HEADS:15,SECS:63,BPS:512.

2nd CHD [Torrent: isoHunt.com Mame 0.132u4 CHDs]

chdman - MAME Compressed Hunks of Data (CHD) manager 0.132 (Jun 8 2009)
Input file: nbanfl.chd
Header Size: 108 bytes
File Version: 4
Flags: NO_PARENT, READ_ONLY
Compression: zlib+
Hunk Size: 4096 bytes
Total Hunks: 1052258
Logical size: 4,310,046,720 bytes
SHA1: f60c627f85f1bf58f2ea674063736a1e516e7e9e
Raw SHA1: 4256c7487a55fd0d0e4241f595cc886d4402fd7d
Metadata: Tag='GDDD' Length=35
CYLS:8908,HEADS:15,SECS:63,BPS:512.

Do I need to try file versions 1 and 2? I'm almost convinced the gold version chd will not work for me due to the security chip installed on my board.

I flipped DIP 7 to see how the boot tests went. The answer: not good

Check the screen below. I have no idea how to diagnose it, but there's a lot of fail going on (the last test passed though).

The weird thing is that the disk surface scan tests are all fine in the diagnostics menu. HELP!
 

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All I can say is that my board fails the same exact tests - even though everything runs fine. I posted a thread about the failing FIFO tests a while back, but no one seems to know anything about them. I figure it's OK.
 
Update: ToplessZ was awesome enough to send over some CHD files, a boot chip, and a pair of security chips (1.5 and 3.0).

Although, when I swapped them out, I couldn't get to the bootloader screen like I was able to with my original configuration, so I switched back and now the original chips don't allow for the boot menu.

I get a "P" display on the LED, then a bunch of random numbers and it cycles through. Tried it with 2 different hard drives that power on and are audibly running but nothing happens.

Anyone have an axe and some lighter fluid laying around? I'm planning on a bonfire shortly.
 
I'm afraid I don't have answers for you.

I think I'm going to pull my Gauntlet Legends hard drive and image it with Drive Image in the next few weeks -- just in case.

I'll probably go the CF route myself although I'm pretty sure that both Drive Image and Ghost will not write to USB drives perhaps they will write to a CF drive?

Sounds like CHDMAN is just not reliable... I may try it with a CF drive just for the hell of it... guess I'll lose all of my saved characters that way though...
 
I don;t know what to tell any of you guys. The only "problems" I've had are using the 1.5 or 2.5 (or was it 2.6??) image and a 3.0 pic. The game boots no errors on post. starting a game reuslt sin stutter and then reboot. If you have a 3.0 pic it should work fine. CHDMAN works perfectly. I've used different versions and had the same results .... a perfect engine. I don;t want to throw bad JUJU at Toplezz but I believe the one thing you all have in common is the chips were bought from the same person? Yes? No? I bought mine off of a guy on eBay. The other so called "problem" I have is the game no longer allows what game to boot up to. Mine automatically boots the NBA Showtime gold. No matter what the dip switch is set for. Others have mentioned the same problem as well. I'm not going to worry about any of this as I am literally selling this game tomorrow to a fellow KLOVIAN. I wish you all the very best of luck figuring your issues out. Please do not PM me - I have no other answers or wisdom to share ;)
 
I can vouch that chdman is very unreliable. I recently was able to fix my machine despite it making a corrupt backup image of my original hard drive by using MAME's nbanfl chd. There may be a trick to it, however.

For me, the drive has to be Master/Single. On most WD drives, this means removing the jumper connector completely. I go into device manager, open up disk management, format the entire drive to NTFS and then delete said volume. Once that's done, I fire up chdman by running it in administrator mode and typing, "chdman.exe -extract nbanfl.chd \\.\PHYSICALDRIVEX" (X = whatever the drive number is in device manager, 0, 1, etc.).
 
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Yikes...that's not good news. Maybe I'll re-try imaging over the chd again using something other than chdman.

While it is free, people seemingly have nothing but trouble getting a good file transfer regardless of the chdman command prompt printing a "success" message. Would something like Norton Ghost work, or is there a preferred alternative imaging program in the KLOV/arcade museum world?

Another thing: Do I have to reformat the HDD every time I attempt to re-image?

Also, if you are interested, I was able to download a Gold (3.0) Sportstation CHD from user Deadly before discovering it wouldn't work with my security PIC/ROM chip. Maybe it will help you, though. You should PM him or me if you need it because I don't think you can get it anywhere else on the net or through MAME.

UPDATE: I was able to get the disk up and running fine, all diagnostic checks pass, but the game freezes and restarts whenever gameplay is about to load (in attract mode and after trying to start a game for both nba and nfl).

I can select a team in nba mode and get to the "tonight's match up" screen, but when entering codes, the game stutters and then finally freezes and re-starts. In nfl, I can get past the enter initials screen, but then after that the screen goes blank and resets before choosing teams.

I suspect that I have the right version and that this isn't a jumper issue, but perhaps the disk drive is too slow or the image is corrupted by chdman? (testing yielded results around 15mb/s average bursts from the Western Digital)

I would hope that it's not an issue with the security chip or ROM version. I read somewhere where someone else with a "Blitz 2000" security chip has the MAME nbanfl.chd up and running fine. So close!

mine does the exact same thing. It wont ever start an actual game. my game actually did nothing, i bought a new hd and it started up fine and i played 2 games on each, shortly after it started resetting after the code screen like yours. I still cant figure out why, but i havent put too much time into it yet.
 
I'm going to buy a new IDE cable just for giggles. It's possible that it has become faulty after reconnecting it a few dozen dimes after not being touched for a decade. I'm just amazed that a 3.0 image would even load with my current set up because I'm pretty sure the security chip is for 1.5 versions.

Also, the board chips all go in a certain way, so I'll have to pour over all the pictures I took before I started switching things around just to make certain everything is aligned properly.

After that, I call in a local dealer and bite the bullet on them servicing it because I'm getting tired of imaging and re-imaging hard drives unless a fresh set of eyes has other ideas?
 
i dont know much about burning hd's but u can get them from a guy on ebay named arcademojo for like 19.99. hes a great guy and ive bought 3 total from him now and he has on one occasion went way above the call of duty to help me out. dunno if your past the whole hd thing or not but might be worth checking out.
 
i dont know much about burning hd's but u can get them from a guy on ebay named arcademojo for like 19.99. hes a great guy and ive bought 3 total from him now and he has on one occasion went way above the call of duty to help me out. dunno if your past the whole hd thing or not but might be worth checking out.

Good point. Might as well spend $20 or $25 to get a known good hard drive image and then you're down to just the chips you swapped in.

Hell of a lot cheaper than calling in a local hired gun.
 
I'm telling you, CHDMAN is fine and does a perfect job of making the image. Is it dependant on the chipset of the motherboard - technically because both my Intel boards recgonize the drive as drive 0 instead of 1. Outside of that it should work fine for you.

Lastly I'll say if I had to lay money on the table to guess what your issue is, I'd have my money ride on the simple fact you've got the wrong version of chips installed. I booted 3.0 with 1.5 which it booted. starting a game would end up in a hard lock or a reboot. I also tried booting 2.7 pic with the 3.0 image which religeously would end with a constant reboot.

3.0 pic with a 3.0 image works perfectly. Good luck friends. Hold on I believe I still have the old chips - BRB
 
Ok I do still have my old set. I have the U27 boot pic that says 2.6 NFL BLITZ 2000 / NBA Showtime
Other chip says Blitz 2000
Hard drive is the original Seagate 4.3 gig model.

If anyone wants to buy this off of me shoot me an offer SHIPPED via PM.
 
I'm telling you, CHDMAN is fine and does a perfect job of making the image. Is it dependant on the chipset of the motherboard - technically because both my Intel boards recgonize the drive as drive 0 instead of 1. Outside of that it should work fine for you.

Lastly I'll say if I had to lay money on the table to guess what your issue is, I'd have my money ride on the simple fact you've got the wrong version of chips installed. I booted 3.0 with 1.5 which it booted. starting a game would end up in a hard lock or a reboot. I also tried booting 2.7 pic with the 3.0 image which religeously would end with a constant reboot.

3.0 pic with a 3.0 image works perfectly. Good luck friends. Hold on I believe I still have the old chips - BRB

Deadly, with all due respect, I have to disagree with you about chdman. Right now, I have one Sportstation board. Never changed any chips on the board whatsoever. I disconnected my fully working drive, hooked it up to my PC, made a backup image using chdman, then erased it. I then copied that same image back to the drive also using chdman and low and behold, it didn't work. Yet when I copied over the nbanfl.chd from MAME, it started working again. No jumpers were changed on the drive, and nothing else was touched. There is no other explanation for this other than chdman making a corrupt backup image.

Other people have also posted the problems they've had with chdman. The only reason I mentioned this is was a word of mouth bug report.
 
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