161 in 1 MVS Cart Resetting / Glitching

[willbot2000]

This cart is bootleg, hope it's not against form rules?

I ordered the notoriously-poorly-QA'ed 161-in-1 MVS cart from AliExpress and it seems to have an number of issues: While some games will boot and run fine (Thrash Rally, Neo Bomberman, Neo Mr Do!), most don't start at all or boot with glitched graphics then reset.

The seller has offered for me to keep the cart as a partial refund, so I'm wondering if I could fix this. Anyone else know of similar problems?

I've tried a few things:

• Reseating the cart in the MVS / cart shell.
• Looking for bridged pins with a loupe.
• Checked caps (only with a multimeter, not an ESR test).
• Adding a 100uF cap to the regulator output.
• Taped down the ROMs in case of bad BGA soldering.

It's worth noting that this revision of the board (v3?) has the bridged pins on the PCB, so this fix isn't needed http://www.neo-geo.com/forums/showthrea ... bility-fix

I suspect one of two may be wrong: Power or ROMs.

What's interesting is that the fault is somewhat intermittent. E.g. sometimes Neo Turf Masters loads to a black screen, other times to grabbled colors. Sometimes I can get a couple minutes of play on Neo Drift Out! while other times it resets on coin drop.

Any thoughts on what I should try next?

[thegreathopper]

I would try another MVS board first, then if that doesn’t work buy a Neosd MVS, they work very well.

[willbot2000]

I would try another MVS board first, then if that doesn’t work buy a Neosd MVS, they work very well.

Unfortunately only have one working board (one faulty, but that's for another thread). Board runs my Metal Slug 2 cart (original) fine. But did cross my mind it could be the board.

[willbot2000]

That said the board does have the GA11 NEO-BUF replaced with a bypass like this: https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=NEO-BUF

Could this be causing the issue?