Smash TV blocky text/black lines/resets and more

mecha

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I have a Smash TV board that has numerous graphical glitches, and the game will also lock up to a grey screen after completing the first level. so I will tell you what I've tried with it so far, and share some picture goodness.

another Smash TV board topic suggested that the U99 chip could either be bad or need replacement. I pulled one from my High Impact Football to drop in and there was no change, and likewise, the High Impact board also ran fine, so it wasn't the U99. I also swapped CPUs, no change.

first off, in the picture of the board, while I had the game running I started pushing down on every single IC on the board. I was able to narrow it down to a couple of RAMs I'm guessing between the ROM sockets (circled in red) where if you pushed down on them even gently, the text would clear up and the black lines would go away completely. I inspected the underside of the board a LOT and there was no damage to any traces in that area. the two "RAM" chips I saw had entire halves of their pins where they were barely in the through holes, so I assumed I could just desolder them out and solder them back in flat.

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this did not correct the problem, but now I realized I could push down anywhere inside the green box and get the same clearing of the problems. the game's lockup issue also went away. the component side solder joints on all the SR resistor packs (I'm guessing that's what they are) looked a little cracked in several places, so that was my next plan of attack to reflow all the solder going to those.

after doing this, I was no longer able to clear the board up by pressing down on any of the components in the green box. so now I'm back to where I started with no obvious solution available.

what should I try next? channelmanic? anyone?

pictures of what it's doing:
IMAG0013.jpg


IMAG0020.jpg


IMAG0017.jpg



I'll show off my supergun too, lol
IMAG0022.jpg
 

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My boardset would gray screen when the sound board wasn't hooked up, once it was i had no more gray screen issue.
 
Look at the insides of the legs on the EPROMs to see if they are crusty... look at the sockets for corrosion... check continuity between chips for their power, ground, and address/data lines.
 
Look at the insides of the legs on the EPROMs to see if they are crusty... look at the sockets for corrosion... check continuity between chips for their power, ground, and address/data lines.

how exactly do I do this? I only know how to check for +5 on an EPROM lol

the chips were squeaky clean last I could tell. usually the first thing I check for is corrosion after my MK2 experiences (that Brood echoes in almost every thread now lol). like I said, after I reflowed those yellow resistor strip things along the sockets, I couldn't get it to clear up anymore. perhaps when I laid a gallon of solder on those (j/k) to make them super solid, the board is now unable to flex in that certain position to make the graphic problems go away?

mrbill: point taken, that's how I received almost all of my boards though, I don't have antistatic wrap that size in any particular abundance.

EDIT: I suppose what I'm saying is I don't think it has anything to do with the roms or rom sockets, because I didn't touch any of those and now my magic cure is impossible to do again.
 
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(that Brood echoes in almost every thread now lol)

Hey it's been a proven fix many many times, and it's a simple easy thing to do. it should be one of the first things on a checklist along with check your voltages. lol

i gotta say too, sometimes i feel like a broken record. Just like "where do i get a soudboard harness"....
 
make one! lol

I've contemplated building them and selling them, since everyone always asks about them.
 
what the record?

oh the harnesses? bobs are cheap enough and i don't have enough of those molex connectors. I'm not about to start soldering wires to header pins on the board if i don't have to either (lol you know what i mean).


Just noticing too your board has red dips while mine has blue.... interesting. ok back on topic :D
 
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you know I actually did that on an MK board. it was back in the primitive age before I used a desoldering iron... it was also the time I dropped my soldering iron and tried catching it in mid air and it left a burn on my forearm about 3 inches long. alas, I had an MK board where half the sound harness was gone, so I removed the header from the main board and soldered the wires in direct in a VERY shitty manner. and then I tried soldering 4 wires to the kick harness, cause I didn't have an MK1 kick harness.

oh god I've come a long way since 2008..
 
man i've come a long way since feb 2011 (this place is a gold mine). but i hear ya i've been nickle-dicking this hobby since 2003-ish
 
when my grandparents had to go back into business and opened a game room, at the encouragement of the tech guy that pretty much helped me fix 60 games in one fell swoop and showed me how to do the shit, he said we needed some fighting games. and so too came Tekken 3 and Street Fighter Alpha 2. the Tekken was a KI cab, I could see the art underneath that wall of black spraypaint.

then one day it occurred to me "I have JAMMA shit!" and then MK2 followed, in all its broke ass-ness. not only did I overpay for it, but it's become like my textbook for how to do basic maintenance on JAMMA boards now, as you've been informed. lol shortly thereafter I started collecting all the MKs, and then I got the wild idea of doing KI1, which cost a lot of money, and then the restoration followed.

I picked up another Midway cab, and then the shenanigans went really out of control. my collection of 3 cabs escalated to some insane number, which my VAPS tells the story of. I'd have a lot more money today if this hobby of mine that I always wanted to get into (from when I was a little kid banging on Joust and Tapper and Donkey Kong back in the mid 80s) never took over.

it was a lot of fun until monitors started dying and I had to learn more things.
 
well, as per what channelmanic told me to do, I started probing all the rom sockets and everything checked out. then I started checking resistance on all those SR parts that I resoldered, and one of them... I only got readings on half of it. upon closer inspection, it was cracked in half.

I'm leaning towards this being the cause, I'm thinking before I reflowed it and when I pressed down on the board to clear it up, I was bending the SR back together lol. since I reflowed it so heavy, it wouldn't do it anymore. however, I was able to flex the board to get readings on all the points, then suddenly I got nothing again.

I'm gonna chop one off one of my shitpiece MK boards and I'll check back. won't be for awhile though, gonna be another busy day at work.
 
I was going to say check those ceramic long caps or w/e they are (don't know the term for those orange/brown hotdog things), good catch. hopefully it's just that :D
 
All fixed. Well, sorta. I still have the grey screen lock up issue after level 1 though. The reset trick that takes you to the 2nd world however does not have any freezes. Should I redo the game roms next? I lack the pleasure dome lol
 
All fixed. Well, sorta. I still have the grey screen lock up issue after level 1 though. The reset trick that takes you to the 2nd world however does not have any freezes. Should I redo the game roms next? I lack the pleasure dome lol

Do you have the soundboard fully hooked up?

if not that's causing your gray screen and lock. SEE POST 21
 
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Do you have the soundboard fully hooked up?

if not that's causing your gray screen and lock.

No I am not using the sound board. Never had that problem with any other game, but smash tv is actually the odd bird of the Y-unit lot lol. Probably some secondary security feature.
 
No I am not using the sound board. Never had that problem with any other game, but smash tv is actually the odd bird of the Y-unit lot lol. Probably some secondary security feature.

i'm thinking the same here, when i got my boardset a couple weeks ago; i plugged it in w/o the soundboard fully hooked up (not sure if i had the volume pot but i think that was required also) the game would always lock up after about 1 minute (or past the 1st room) and go gray screen. I noticed a bunch of other posts that had the same issue and all were missing/not fully hooked up with the sound board. Hooked up everything how it should be and my gray screen crash/error/fail was no longer an issue. (see post #21)
 
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i'm thinking the same here, when i got my boardset a couple weeks ago; i plugged it in w/o the soundboard fully hooked up (not sure if i had the volume pot but i think that was required also) the game would always lock up after about 1 minute (or past the 1st room) and go gray screen. I noticed a bunch of other posts that had the same issue and all were missing/not fully hooked up with the sound board. Hooked up everything how it should be and my gray screen crash/error/fail was no longer an issue.

yeah, I didn't bother hooking it up cause my supergun presently lacks a speaker for sound anyway. lol
 
it's not as big as you'd think. the top overhangs the box portion by a lot, and the box itself isn't very deep. you should see how I had to shoehorn everything into it (full JAMMA harness, bunch of rolled up wires I didn't want to cut, my JROK TV encoder and sync cleaner, etc.)

ultimately I think I'm gonna have to use a really small speaker or screw one to the back like I did the power supply with little L-brackets.

I'll have to do a post in the showcase section for it showing what I did. I made a molex plug for hooking into the TV encoder or outputting to a RGB harness for a video game monitor (an extra U5000 I just had rejuved that you see in the one picture). overall I love it, can't wait to take it home sometime. I also have a MK2 style kick harness ran to the bottom buttons.
 
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