What's new
By:

CPS 3 not doing anything

diosleon

diosleon

Student
Joined
Feb 11, 2022
Messages
55
Reaction score
18
Location
Miami, FL/Northfield, MN/Caracas, VE
Hello, it's been a while!

So, I haven't been able to turn on my CPSIII regularly. The last couple of times I tried, my cab gave me a black screen. My current setup consists of a Darksoft multi bios cart, and I replaced the dying CD drive with a SD emulator.

Let me know what it could be. If you need more info, I can do it in the next couple of weeks as soon as I get home.
 
Clean the cart socket and reseat. If it doesn’t boot at all and you get a black screen, you might have issues around the cart.
 
Try with a different cps3 cart. My guts tell me that the problem might be there.
 
Try reflowing your BIOS chip (or get someone to help you do it if you don’t have the experience doing so).

Sometimes cold solder can creep in with how it’s flexed (especially in carts worked on a while ago) in the cartridge slot & make a pin or two very slightly raise up & cause a black screen.
 
CPS3 is a pretty extreme security implementation - clearly Capcom had decided there would be no bootlegs on this system :-)

The security cart contains both the BIOS and the SH2 (one of several processors).

Black screen = cannot initiate boot process
Black screen with some garbled graphics = can boot but can’t run bios

Most frequent cause of a black screen on power up (cannot initiate boot) is going to be a problem with the motherboard talking to the security cart. It’s not even trying to bootstrap at this stage, problem way further down the stack.

Given that this was working previously; cleaning the slot and cart edge was my first step.

Next step is to narrow the problem domain by swapping the security cart for a known good one.
 
For the cart edge I normally use a q-tip and 95% or 99% IPA
For the slot maybe try folding some lint free cloth across the edge of a credit card, and also IPA.
 
It is based on the corrosion. It sounds a bit radical, but I used 1000 sandpaper to remove the oxidation, since q-tip didn't help with 99% IPA. I think the best option is an IPA + fiberglass pen combo.
 
I don't think any mechanical abrasion is necessary unless you already tried IPA and it won't boot (and you're absolutely sure nothing else would've caused it to stop working).

I agree that the flow should probably be IPA->fibreglass pen. Sandpaper and magic erasers are probably harsher than I'd personally want to use.

Since I'm here, yeah just piling on that it is most likely mild corrosion on the cart edge or possibly the slot. Most likely the cart. OP's location is South America which I imagine has a higher than usual amount of humidity. Could've easily been caused by less-than-ideal storage.

For cleaning cart slots, I usually just blast them with deoxit and insert/remove a cart a few times. Basically works on everything that isn't seriously messed up.
 
Also, at some point after boot there are some random graphics.

IMG_6017.jpeg
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top