CPS2 B-Board dead?

[Madgear]

Hey all,

Wanted to know if I could get a possible diagnosis here...I have a CPS2 B-board that boots, clicks 5 times, and displays a green or orange screen. I've tested other boards, and they work, so its not the A board.

Is this a dead battery, or is there something I'm missing!

Any help is appreciated. I really appreciate the help you all have given me through the years.

Quick video of what I described here:

[pulstar]

Well, checking the battery is probably the first thing you should do. You can find the suicide checker program on Razoola's page - http://cps2shock.emu-france.info/suicide.html. In the last paragraph. Program that and you should be able to tell if it has suicided.

When was the last time you changed the battery?

When was the last time you tested/played the game?

[yosai]

Looks like it's suicided. Was it running from battery?

[leonardoliveira]

Take a blank eprom, write Razoola's suicide test on it and replace rom 03 with the one you just wrote. Power it on. If it suicided and is physically ok the test will launch and the first music will be played. Diagnostic results of basic tests will be displayed on the screen.

Faults on the A board can also cause that to happen so be sure to test that B board on a known working A board.

[Madgear]

Thank you for the responses.

I'm a cabinet casual, not quite your the level you guys are. So step by step things that require hardware changes and wiring--I'm cool with that. The stuff you all are suggesting sounds a bit beyond my understanding haha. I'm not sure I understand how to program anything

As for some of the questions:

I actually bought the ST board that died on here! A few years ago, and I believe the battery was never changed.

Last time I played and tested the game was some months ago. I had rotated the monitor to play some shmups and recently went back to the horizontal orientation for fighters. When last used, the game worked perfectly fine.

And yep-running from battery.

[JoeAwesome]

Take a blank eprom, write Razoola's suicide test on it and replace rom 03 with the one you just wrote. Power it on. If it suicided and is physically ok the test will launch and the first music will be played. Diagnostic results of basic tests will be displayed on the screen.

Faults on the A board can also cause that to happen so be sure to test that B board on a known working A board.

This. Create a suicide test eprom or have someone make one for you, and literally replace it with one eprom on the B board. Power up, and see.

[Madgear]

Ha, I'll do my best then!

[JoeAwesome]

Ha, I'll do my best then!

Take your time. If it's dead, it's dead, and there's lots of info on where to go from there. If you need any more detailed help on doing this, feel free to PM me or post here. Good luck!

[darkcrono]

Seems dead yup, try undamned's infinikey it's newb to soldering iron friendly, or nobatterycps2.

[leonardoliveira]

Seems dead yup, try undamned's infinikey it's newb to soldering iron friendly, or nobatterycps2.

But that's a waste if he has a hardware fault. He need to test first.

[darkcrono]

True true, the volt measure on the battery should be first test, but, razoolas test means you have the eeprom burner or someone o someplace to do it, not my case, and, once you have done the test, it's quite the way you go for the unencrypted roms, meaning you lose the original roms (burning them over, or swapping), an undamned pcb is somewhere 15$ ish i think, an arduino nano even cheaper, so it is not a big deal for a test.

The clicking sound can be the credit counter, too loud i think, but madgear could confirm

[leonardoliveira]

Lithium batteries do not drop voltage at first, they drop the supplied current so you get the nominal voltage even when it's practically empty. The problem is that when it is empty, the act of power cycling the board may cause the voltage to sweep low due to current deprivation from the battery side, which could corrupt the key data, eventually bricking the game. The caps may help protect against that but, the boards are 30 years old now, right? How much life the caps still have left in them? Can we trust them?

[darkcrono]

so that could be the case behind my cps2 that had the battery at 3,7v, still dead board.

[Madgear]

Ressurection!

I need to tackle this finally. Now that I'm inside during our shelter-in-place, I finally have some time to devote to learning how to run razoola's test.

EDIT--Is Raz's site down? That link seems to break for me....

[yosai]

Works fine here, albeit 2 hours later.

Site

http://cps2shock.emu-france.info/

Suicide tester

http://cps2shock.emu-france.info/downlo ... sterv2.zip