Namco 246 Diagnostics

[DCrosby]

This is to go over, and compare notes and try to help others diagnose 246 Issues.

So I have 2 Namco 246 Boards, once came out of a Ridge Racer 5 and Once Came out of a Time Crisis 3
Both Boards seemed to be "Dead" as when I plugged them in via Proper Power from a regulated PC power supply, and via AC Mains on Ridge Racer 5 they both didn't want to open the CD Drive, and both made only 3 rings and the "Ha, Ha, Ha," without any cards inserted. This is "Normal" as 246's from what I've seen without a dongle (Magic Gate Memory Card) Which is what it boots off of. Once the boot is semi-sucessfull, it allows you to open the CDR Door.

I then purchased a Tekken 5 CDR (No Dongle DOH!) and a Soul Calibur 2 (With Dongle) and a couple of Battle Gear3 Dongles (No HDD Doh x2) to have in case I can try and figure out if I can move images onto old dongles or if old dongles help in making multi's ... but I digress...

Once I put in the Soul Caliber II dongle, I get 2-3 beeps, and then a robotic "Ha Ha Ha Ha" sound. So not great.
When I put in the Battle Gear 3 Dongle, the beeps increased to 4-5+ but the "Ha ha ha ha" sound stopped, after which it then stopped and displayed something on the monitor for the first time, something along the lines of it couldn't boot the game. (Since it had the soul caliber CD/DVD in the drive" and not the Battle Gear 3 HDD. (Understandable)

And it allowed me to open the CD drive door to eject whatever disk was in it.


As far as Soul Caliber goes, I tried the eraser and Isopropyl Aclhohol but no dice, I wonder if the dongle is bad, I guess I'd have to send it in, I do have a CECHZM1 (Original) so maybe I can read it and or see if it even remotely smacks of the SC2 Key, but I have some more threads to read, I don't trust myself with soldering it onto a PS2 Memory Card, also because when I opened Both each looks very different... SC2 Memory Card on top (Virgin) PS2 On the bottom.

 

[DCrosby]

So a slight update and goof on my part, but still something to consider / look at are:

Most games come with 1 Security Card. This needs to be in the Left Most Memory card slot.
Soul Caliber 2 comes with 2 cards, what's a bit counter intuitive, is that the card with the Soul Caliber Logo on it is the Memory card and NOT the Key. So the Key one (without the SC2 logo) goes in the left and the Memory card goes into the right, the game started to boot. I then added a CD-R which then also started to open and close, once the cards boots, and gets the OS up and running. A successful boot also has no "HA HA Ha" sounds, just 4-5 beeps and then after a couple of seconds the CDR spins up.

Note: Don't spam the eject button as it will remember this, and open/close the door, and there's a possibility to Jam a Disk or Scratch it... (I didn't, but was shocked it opened/closed several times)

At this time I have SC2 Running, but it's missing the JVS IO Card, I have a Capcom one for MVSF2 but that one needs a Jamma Power, and for right now I'm waiting for the card. But it did show the error searching for JVS IO.

I did try and make a Battle Gear 3 HDD from an old IDE HDD 80 GB I had sitting around, and it didn't work, I'm not sure what I did wrong, I wrote the raw data from the CDH image, to the drive via command line tools on PC I have for those types of things running Windows XP. I wonder if it checks the total sectors to see if the drive is genuine.