Help! - Contra Spirits (J-NTSC) not booting up

[Ric]

Hi there

I recently bought a Japanese NTSC version of Contra Spirits with two other Japanese NTSC games.

I have a PAL SNES with a universal adaapter and it plays all my NTSC games perfectly

However, I have had no luck with the contra. The cart itself has now been extensively cleaned however will just not boot. The other two carts I bought both work.

The cart itself is not "firm" in that when I put it in the slot it wiggles quite a bit. Canm anyone offer any suggestions?

Anyone had any issues with Contra before?

Thanks

Ric

[son_ov_hades]

Contra is a Famicom game, not Super Famicom. It won't play on a SNES, it will on a NES with a converter though.

[nintendodork]

Contra Spirits is the Japanese title for Contra III: The Alien Wars, hades.   It's a SNES game.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contra_3

[Ric]

Yep

It's Contra Spirits for the SNES (not the NES game)

I have opened up the game and it is pretty clean inside but there may be damage on the tracks. I am going to trace them and see if there are broken tracks on the PCB.

Will update

[Ric]

Hi there

No extra pins

I have opened it up

The solder tracks I thought were broken have tested ok on the multimeter.

It doesn't look like any other cart I have seen online.

Small daugter-board with a NE556N bipolar timer chip on it and a single chip on the back (i presume this is the main rom?

Tried booting it again with no luck.

Going to try and scope the timer next

Ric

[133MHz]

That IS weird. The cart seems largely unpopulated, and why is there a dual 555 timer on a daughterboard? I've never seen such a thing before.

At first glance it looks like a pirate board, with the 555 timer circuit as a crude way to disable the SNES lockout chip (it seems so crude that I doubt that it even works). Since you're using one of those cartridge adapters with a second slot for plugging in an official PAL game for lockout bypass you shouldn't have any problem with the 555 kludge (since it would be sitting there doing nothing). But maybe it could be important to the boot process. The game software could be waiting for something on the timer circuit to happen before starting execution or something along those lines.

You could try removing the 555 board altogether and installing a legit PAL CIC in its place (it looks like there are provisions for that on the board), then try to boot the board directly in your SNES, no adapters.

First post of the new decade!

[Ric]

Wow

firstly, thank you for the reply. It is really appreciated.

secondly, whilst I could not find any pics on the net, I hadn't put two and two together that it is a bootleg. The cart itself looks legit and there are no other outward signs to suggest it is a bootleg.

Can you explain what I would do with the CIC chip? Would it just be a case of finding a PAL CIC and seeing If it it would work?

Having a look at the cart, it would seem that the CIC would go in place of the current crazy daughterboard.

Thanks again.

Ric