Thank you Mitsurugi, it turn out to be a bad Simm stick Is there an easy way to determine which chip on the stick is bad? The cheapo/tinkerer in me want to repair the stick.
If you have a superbios cart you can do a write to the bad simm and see where the write freezes. The only thing is I have never determined which chip contains which memory addresses in relation to the whole 128mb simm file. If we determine which chip holds which data we could very easily determine which chip is bad. I have about 50/50 chance fixing a simm just by reflowing all of the chips.
I will do a reflow and hope for the best. I'm just reading up on yavuzg post on upgrading 32mb to 128mb. My bad and donor simm both use Hitachi chips, so that can aways be a plan B. Either way, my friend will be happy once I bring his board back to life. This is all good info for me, as I takle the graphic issue on my board.
The Super bios write did not show anything out of the norm (write fine with no error) which lead me to believe it's on the last set of chips. I moved the simm in question to slot 3 (the board write the cha 1st then pro) I get to 16% before I get the error which confirm what I thought. Reflow the back side of the Simm. Rewrite 3rd Strike and the game boot up. My friend picked it up today and is happy to be playing 3rd strike again.
PS: There seem to be 2 different kind of Simm one with Hitachi the other Fujitsu. Is one more reliable then the other?
Some people see Fujitsu chips as bad. Actually Fujitsu had their flash business run together with AMD. Eventually they fully merged the business and it changed name to "Spansion".
Before that they were just "technology partners". Like SHARP flashroms work as second source for INTEL ones.
Hitachi merged it's semiconductor business with Mitsubishi to form "Renesas". Few years later, NEC too, merged it's semiconductor business with them.
Since we're talking about 20 years old chips I don't really know what to say. Probably something like "you're lucky these still work". lol
Ah, tried cleaning the pins and swapping simms (3,4,5,6) around and still got "Error Code 60". Then I swapped simms 1&2, tried to rewrite again and timer went to zero and still got the "Error 60".
Do you think it's maybe a board issue then since it stays the same no matter where the simms are or maybe a bad disc? Can I use like a CDR in the drive with a different game and see if it flashes correctly?