Problems with my repro carts or SNES? Please help!

I decided to make some reproduction carts of fan translated, mostly RPG, SNES games for my brother. I'd converted wireless xbox controllers to arcade sticks, entirely re-wired a Sega New Astro City candy cab, I could do this. I read up on it, bought a TL866 programmer, some 29F033C eeproms, TSOP40 type 3 adapter boards and a sack full of Madden and NHL '95 carts. Made my own adapter for the programmer and I also got some cr2302 cells and holders to solder in, making changes battery ten years from now easy.



Finished putting together FFV, plugged the cart in; black screen. After a little trial and error I found no continuity on one of the 29F033C legs, it must have gotten loose when I was cleaning off the flux. I re-drag soldered it and it fired right up just fine! I quickly made a Bahamut Lagoon and it also worked... for about 10 minutes. During a scene change it went black, with a few red "veins" garbled around. I reset and this time it just froze during a scene, even sooner than last time. At least FFV still worked.


About 9 hours into playing FFV (not in one sitting!), by brother tells me at some point the screen went black with music playing and when he reset, it went all glitched out within a minute. I cleaned out the pins on the games; first with white eraser before I read not to, then I used 99% iso. Took apart the SNES and cleaned the connector. Blew some canned air to get the dust out, then alcohol and cloth on a credit card. Cloth didn't get too dirty, nothing wrong on the board (sns-cpu-rgb-02) seemingly, caps weren't bloated or leaking. Cleaned up some crusted old flux (?) where the power in is soldered to the board. Put it back together and it's still got the same problems.


What happens with BL and FFV usually when I turn it on I just get a black screen with slightly, just barely noticeable "noise"; lighter areas of black that make either a diamond pattern or horizontally moving lines. Sometimes with FFV only, I'll get a screen full of glitchy graphics and buzzing sound; I turn it off, fast. Same with a Madden '97, which I either hadn't touched yet or had just done the battery holder mod. Worked fine at first, then would glitch after a bit. Now when I turn it on, sometimes the led will glow, but there's no video, but usually it'll just be the same black screen. It's almost like something "builds up" with these games and they start to fail after a couple of times powered on.
The weird thing is, all the old games, (SMW, Metroid, FF2, FF3, CT, Mega Man etc) all usually work. Sometimes we get the black screen, then reset or re-seat the cart and they work fine. It could just be my imagination, but it seems that happens right after I've had one of the "bad" carts just in. If I didn't know better (and I do) it's like some curse or disease is spreading from these damned repros I made.


I can't tell you how disappointed I am. Either I screwed up making a couple of simple repros or the SNES is on the way out (then why do the old games work fine???).
Anyway, anyone ever see something like this? Any help at all as to how and what to investigate next would be greatly appreciated. Sorry about all the text, I wanted to be as descriptive as possible. I don't want to fail, I'd really like to get those two games, and more in the future, going.

 

If anyone is wondering, I found the problem and it was... shitty drag soldering! I had a look at one of the chips under a good light, and a couple of the pads for the tsop didn't look fully tinned. Figuring it couldn't really hurt, I resoldered both and they came back to life!

I have never drag soldered before and had even read that you don't need to with these tsop boards having pads that are already tinned. I suppose I was too sloppy. I had tested the leads for continuity and found no problems, but they're very small so it'd be easy get it wrong. I didn't seriously consider a cold joint anyway because I figured the eeprom just wouldn't have worked from the get go and would've been picked up by the programmer. I guess what happened was that a couple of the leads were just barely connected, then expansion from warming up during play disconnected them.

 

Incase you get tired of soldering and messing around with old cartridges, you might want to try this: http://www.infiniteneslives.com/aux5.php

And ofcourse they are reprogrammable, unlike the carts using the TSOP adapters which technically are reprogrammable but it's quite a bit of work to achieve that.

 

Oooh! New SNES boards! I'm surprised they didn't replace the battery backup with flash memory though, that would be two birds with one stone!

 

That so sounds like 3.3V flash memories being run at 5v ... lol

Glad it was nothing like that and you got it sorted out anyway...

Here's pics of a Repro of my own:

Star Ocean (3.3v flash)

 

Atleast the battery is now in an easily changed holder now. Beats having to desolder things.

 

While those flash boards do look nice and the programmers are even reasonably priced, they sort of make it too easy, you know? Sounds dumb, but I like the act of creating the board and I find soldering relaxing; when it's not SMT anyway! Heck, I don't even play the games anymore. Next up is replacing the caps on my Sega NAC and my friend's MVS monitors. I gotta keep the screen pretty dim and low contrast to keep the colours from bleeding, hopefully new caps will fix that.

 

And that SO cart looks nice. Are those 10 and 20k resistors on there, like this?

 

Seems to be 1N4148 diodes. It's an other way for convert 5V to 3.3V.

 

The "glass looking" parts are actually diodes.

More like this:

5V ---|>|---|>|----(get 3v here)----|220R|---- GND

Exploiting the fact that each diode has a voltage drop on the junction it's possible to achieve an "poor's man" voltage regulator when you're dealing with devices which draw weak currents. (Flash memory do qualify)

 

What flash chip did you use?

 

Looks like I spoke too soon, just found out that both glitched out again; Bahamut Lagoon after a few minutes, FFV after two and a half hours. Same as before. What is going on?? Bro's going to play a bunch of Mario All Stars to see if it's the conole.

 

Something equivalent to a 27C320 EPROM, but TSOP form factor: A Fujitsu MBM29LV320T flash memory.

 

how much would you charge for programming and or making a board like that ?

 

Those are available commercially. You just need to look for them.