I have these 3 SNES boards and 1 NES board I cant get to work, all have been kept in the dark for last 15 years easy, none of them boot to any screen or even get the SNES power light to turn on when in the system, any ideas are much appricated. I have them with an electrical engineer friend atm being looked over, but any into I can relay to him would be appricated.

SNES Cart 1




SNES Cart 2




Edit: removed SNES cart 3 and NES cart due to info from Ninjistar, thanks!

Edit 2: we got both carts you work, they both turned out to be Mortal Kombat 1, both almost identical to the released version.

I'm far from an expert on SNES protos (or protos in general), but here goes.

Cart 1 definitely looks like a proto
Cart 2 definitely looks like a proto
Cart 3 looks like a retail cart (SNS-E8-0) on the chip, which when Google'd yields U.N. Squadron (http://snescentral.com/article.ph...)
Cart 4 looks like a Famicom cart with a NES adapter. These are common with games like the US Stack Up (and others, Gyromite being another). According to the bootgod database, SQF-KG, which is printed on the board, is King's Knight.

I'd be really interested to find out what the 2 potential prototype carts really are.

I hope this helps.

Thanks for the info, Ill try the femicom game in the original system and see what pops up, 3rd snes game looked retail, but seemed weird to be with all the other protos so wasnt sure.

One additional note I have on this regarding King's Knight. I don't recall ever hearing about a US version of this cart having a Famicom board and an NES adapter inside. I think more information is needed on this one. If this is an original, it could be pretty uncommon (or even a gem). But again, more information is needed.

Do these boards all have corresponding carts?  If not, you should be careful not to accidentally put them into the console backwards.  This is easily done and has bad results. I once fried a SNES console by doing this. Oops!  Let us know what you find out!

 

none of the snes games had carts, just loose in a box, lol, I have been using a modded back of a cart to hold the boards when testing, so none have been put in backwards at least.

Good to hear!  I just thought I'd let you know about that fact. I learned it the hard way and I'd hate to see you accidentally damage something.

 

yeah, my first famicom I got at a value village for 2.99 and didn't know not to plug a US NES power adapter into it, poof smoke, lol. live and learn I guess.

Why do people leave the UV erasure Windows uncovered?! Perhaps why the ROM is corrupt and won't boot.
 

If you have a multimeter the first thing I'd check is if the board has a short between the ground and 5V pins... since the system won't even display the on LED when one of these boards is in.

Based on this discoloration around the windows and the gunk build up it looks like someone peeled the tape up. :/
 

I got these less then 24 hours ago, and before that they were bouncing around in a wine box in an attic for the last 15 years, no idea when or who took the tape off, it has since been taped back over. And Ill pass the multimeter info off to my friend who's looking over them. thanks.

If you think about the original purpose of these carts, the real utilitarian nature of them, I can see why they would be left off. These are meant to be non-production hardware used for testing things. If you're a dev, it would be more of a PITA to put a foil sticker on this. And why care anyway when it won't be exposed long enough to matter, let alone that you'll probably flash it again in 2 weeks. That's my view on it, at any rate, for whatever that's worth!  

 

I recently hit a treasure trove of protos 5 of which. Wouldn't work. I removed the eproms, Reseated them and still nothing. But had a long snes dev board. I Put the eproms on to that and used a few custom settings with the dip switches and got them all to work.

I'm no proto guru, but taking photos with the flash on and the eproms uncovered is a no-no get some small white stickers and cover them asap. Althought as mention above the roms could be damaged or corrupted.

A few have mentioned always have the chips / eproms pointing to the back of the console when plugging into a snes. So you only want to see the green board and solder once its plugged into the console.

If you plug in the wrong way it can over heat very quickly.

Makes sense.

Even though a camera/phone shouldn't produce UV light, I probably still wouldn't take a picture with flash pointed at an exposed UV erasure window.

These days, we sometimes say "flash" when we mean writing to a non-volatile solid state ROM chip. That comes from the old days where you had to "flash" with UV light to erase a chip before you could re-write it.

[edit]

Maybe I'm wrong about that!

You never "flashed" with UV light, you put the EPROMs in a box that shines a UV light to erase the grid.

Thanks for all the info everyone, these are my first protos and most of this info is all new to me, I honestly didn't know jack about eproms before this whole experience and only had seen pictures of them with stickers on them and figured that was for identification only, they were only photographed once and have been taped over since the first person said anything.

Cell phone cameras (or any camera aside from medical equipment) doesn't output any UV light, so you'll never have to worry about that.

Top one looks like it might have some damaged traces. Second one looks like it might have some corroded solder joints.

friend just brought them back over and we got both to fire, both being MK1, can't see anything diffrent from release.

That's cool you got them working. Bet that was exciting!

Oh poop...

"The erasing window must be kept covered with an opaque label to prevent accidental erasure by the UV found in sunlight or camera flashes."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...

Modern LED flash has a very limited spectrum, so it still shouldn't produce any UV light. You never know if there could be a little UV leakage from the flourescent lights we have to use these days. I wouldn't want even a single bit to get flipped.
 

Where did the term "flash an updated BIOS" originate? The term was common long before flash memory became common.

It originated with EPROMs and became common parlance when speaking of re-writing EEPROMs too.

[edit]

Maybe I'm wrong about that.
 

It was never used for erasing them with UV light, which is what I said. EEPROMs aren't erased by UV light. EEPROMs don't have a glass window, either. Flashing is the writing to the chip, not erasing. But good try.

I know very well the difference between EPROM and EEPROM (the latter being electronically erasable). I was taught [perhaps incorrectly] back in 1999 that the term originated from erasing EPROMs so they could be written again. Then it supposedly stuck and is often used to describe writing other solid-state ROMs, like EEPROMs.