lupin3rd wrote:It was only after moving to the master side that it suddenly took issue with switch 8 in bank 1.
To make sure I understand: DIP switch bank 1 is the bank for the master CPU, and DIP switch bank 2 is for the slave CPU?
So theoretically, whatever is in the master CPU shouldn't be able to care about what's going on in bank 2, and vice versa?
What's confusing me is the bit where your picture in the album (
https://imgur.com/KlZBirb ) shows DIP switches 1-7 as OFF, but the value on-screen (
https://imgur.com/V45mBgb ) shows all DIP switches as ON. Hence asking about temporal order. And also asking if anything's seemed suspicious when games are run on the master side of this specific board.
I left my quirky NES Balloon Fight in the system (but on the slave side) during the characterization test on the Master side.
I would have assumed that would have caused the system to reboot every... oh, right, it only fails the watchdog after a 2 player game when the first player dies. Right. Ok. No, I don't think that should change things.
My understanding is that the 2A04 is for use on the master side, when only one game is installed on the board (in the slave side). So is this a dummy CPU?
As far as we know, the 2A04 is "just" a jumper between pin 20 and pin 38, causing the shared RAM to always be granted to the "slave" CPU. (For example, Vs. SMB relies on having access to that extra 2 KiB of RAM, but its documentation also says several other games—but not all—are sufficiently equivalent to the 2A04)
If you're willing to sit down with a multimeter and see if that is true, that would be helpful! (And maybe see if any other pins are shorted, too?)
I can run more tests for you, if you like. I'm not above shooting video either, so the order of steps and results makes more sense. I had not tried dropping coins into my machine since I had owned it, and the coin mechs were slightly bent. I couldn't even run the test because the switches would get stuck in the closed position. After fixing the bends, the switches would spring back correctly.
Well, thefox wrote
this test that detects the not-missing PPU pixel on the 2C03. I guess it would be nice to verify the same is true on the 2C04... except that it's no longer accessible
There's a few other things mentioned on the wiki
here that we don't know, but determining them might require writing some more tests. (And possibly adjusting the CRT image position, but we'll try to work around that)
If we do write some tests, do you have any of the Vs. System daughtercards that add a more complicated memory manager hardware (e.g. 108 or VRC or MMC1)? And/or have you modified your mainboard to support Vs. Gumshoe?
[From other thread] Oh, you have the UNROM daughterboard. Could you try tepples's
test suite? A lot of the tests won't be relevant on a SD CRT, or sensible on a RGB PPU, but a few (like the "overscan" test) would be nice to have data from.