NetDIMM Acting up again.

[malarrya]

Hello everyone! I am puzzled again by this frustrating NetDIMM. For the longest time it was booting totally fine then recently it started booting to a black screen. I tested the voltage and found it to be 4.93 so I turned it up to 5.03. Now it boots every time but, of course, something else had to start going wrong. I've had the NetDIMM using a wireless bridge to transfer games over and it was a occasionally flaky in the past but now it seems it's not working much at all. I connected it with an Ethernet cable to the router and that seemed to work fine but even now that is only copying over a few MBs before it quits. Could the new higher voltage on the NetDIMM be interfering/degrading the connection? I ran a scan of all the RAM and DIMM memory and they all passed. Is it possible the zero key chip is getting too much voltage or damaged when the voltage increased?

When I try to ping it from a command prompt I get "destination unreachable." The LEDs on the NetDIMM are showing green (flashing occasionally) and red like normal. I've cleared the network settings a couple times and tried different static IPs (192.168.1.5 and 192.168.1.229).

Thanks for any help you guys can provide!

 

[malarrya]

Rebooted the router (there are a lot of devices in the house that use wireless) and at least a wired connection is working again. I accidentally tested with Metal Slug 6 that apparently now works... which never did before. Beats the hell out of me. I may at some point send it the the Sega guy to fiddle with to see if anything needs work. I can fix capacitors but if any board components are going south, I may need help.

 

[GeekMan1222]

This sounds like some kind of networking error to me, especially if it seems to work on wired suddenly. You should be able to ping the netdimm if its setup correctly.
This definitely doesnt seem to be something hardware or voltage related. I could be wrong though.

Based on your saying you have a lot of devices in your home on wifi, perhaps there is some kind of connection quality issue with your wifi channels being too crowded?
You could try to connect another computer to your wifi bridge like a laptop and do a ping to the router and then from another computer in the house ping back to that computer on the wireless bridges end.
Doing this can rule out a hardware issue as well right away.

If your savy enough maybe you can change your wireless channels around or setup like a Virtual Lan or QOS dedicated just for the NetDimm not sure if that would help but I guess its worth a shot. ( I doubt a Virtual Lan or QOS would solve this issue though).

That is all I got coming to mind right now.


Good luck narrowing down your root cause

 

[DoktorSleepless]

I'd say try a direct wired connection before chalking it up to hardware failure. If that works, then we can start working out what is causing the issue. By "direct wired connection", I mean nothing in between what's sending the ROM and the NetDIMM. No routers, no switches, no wireless bridges. Just a single cable.

Ideally, you'd have your PC or RPi set as the gateway for the NetDIMM, so that'd be 192.168.1.1, then set the NetDIMM as 192.168.1.2.

 

[malarrya]

Thanks, guys for the responses. I don't have a crossover cable on hand so I had to order one. In the meantime, I'll keep messing with it. My router has been flashed with DD-WT so doing a virtual LAN or QOS might be possible. It's pretty robust. The bridge I am using is a Vonnets VAP11G but I'd actually rather just use the crossover cable since it's less trouble and power. I do have to confess that when I turned the voltage up it very briefly (split second) went past 5.1V as I was lying on the ground struggling to reach the adjuster pot. Everything else seems to be working great though. I'll report back and let you know if I come to any conclusions. Thanks again!

 

[GeekMan1222]

If you can eliminate wifi all together that would be what I would do.
I have used custom flashed routers for wifi bridges and off the shelf wifi bridges and sometimes they just introduce weird issues.

Start with the simple stuff first like direct connections or ruling out your wifi bridge setup on using other devices if you can.
I am guilty sometimes of jumping to more advanced conclusions without doing the simple stuff.

 

[malarrya]

I'm now using a crossover cable connected to the arcade (Windows 10) machine sitting next to the Naomi and it's working really well. I guess it's just poor wireless performance and too much packet loss. Thanks for all the suggestions, guys. If it starts going haywire again, I'll report back.