CPS1 Varth Board missing sound effects?

[SEGASHIRO]

Hi,

Spoiler

I just need some help troubleshooting a CPS2 B board. It is a 19XX Japanese board and the game boots fine on the HAS and the music plays great. However, the "bomb" button doesn't register at all. I tried it in game and on the test screen. If I load another game onto the same A board the buttons register just fine.

Any suggestions on a fix? Hopefully it is something easy.

I have CPS1 Varth that doesn't seem to play all the sound effects/music when playing. The game also boots up fine and plays well otherwise. When going into the test menu...there seems to be sound files that don't play anything when selected. Any ideas here? Could it be regional differences?

It sounds different than the Mame version. It seems like the game is looking for the appropriate music file finds nothing and just plays a thump noise.

I was thinking new roms were flashed to this board and some error was made. The roms on the board don't look like official Capcom ones.

Thanks!

UPDATE: I solved the initial CPS2 issue with 19XX. The bomb button started working once I had two controllers plugged into the HAS unit.

 

[xodaraP]

CPS1 has a bad habit of the Z80 sound CPU dying, they designed the board around the faster Z80A then used a standard Z80 to cut costs.

If you're getting no sound effects at all, dead Z80 is the likely culprit. If you're getting some sound effects and not others, check the ROMs and check for broken traces

 

[Yippikaye]

What is the best reference for a Z80 change in my faulty CPS1 board (no sound) ?

 

[xodaraP]

Best reference? I don't quite understand what you mean.

If the Z80 has died you'll need to desolder it from the board and install a replacement. CPS1 boards are difficult so you will need proper equipment. I installed a socket in mine when I replaced it.

If it's not the Z80, the amp is the next point of failure generally.

 

[SEGASHIRO]

So, I found this on Arcadeotaku - this guy has the same problem where only some sound effects are missing:

Street Fighter HF sound problem

Does anyone know which roms on Varth contain the sound effects? Also, an anyone write me a set replacements? Or know where I can get files so I can get HobbyRoms to write some new for me?

 

[SEGASHIRO]

Update:

This fix was kinda screwed up. It turns out my Varth board was a conversion and the sound roms were burned wrong and then the person tried to change the jumpers on the board to try to fix the sound issues. So, all of this had to be converted back to normal. After that, no more farting audio!

Even more interesting was the fact that roms on this conversion did not match the ones on MAME. I have included the important snippets of the conversation with Drakon who did this fix for me (and who is totally awesome by the way):

After reprogramming your varth sound eproms, your varth chips ran fine in my street fighter II ce pcb. When I plugged all the varth chips back into your varth pcb, by stage 2 I was presented with fart sound audio. Your guess was completely correct. Your varth looks like a conversion. Whoever programmed the sound chips they somehow programmed them wrong. It looks like they tried moving the jumpers for the sound chips in order to make the sound chips work, which only made it worse. I burned new music / sfx roms for your varth and it seems to run fine. Out of curiosity I dumped the program roms since they were also unlabelled chips, the program roms also didn't match the mame dump. This find really peaked my curiosity, if the program roms aren't written correctly, the game won't run at all, but yours is clearly running. After some prying with a flat blade screwdriver I finally got your C board lifted to see what revision of the ppu your varth pcb is using. Much to my surprise, your varth board isn't using the CPS-B-04 ppu that varth is programmed to run on. Your varth board is running a CPS-B-21 ppu that used to have a suicide battery but the battery circuit was removed and the ppu was soldered into non-suicide default mode. Varth isn't programmed to run on this revision of the cps-1 ppu. I confirmed this by burning the mame dumps and the game just gives me a black screen as you're supposed to get with a cps-1 game that's using the wrong ppu revision. So what this means is, someone rom hacked varth to run on the very common cps-b-21 ppu and burned it onto your board. What this means is, your varth board is an unreleased varth rom hack. This is an awesome find, with the varth hack I dumped from your board, people could convert street fighter 2 ce / turbo pcbs and other more common pcbs that usb the cps-b-21 chip or even the cps-b-01 chip into a varth pcb.

Hooray for my random buying! And more importantly hooray for Drakon for figuring this all out. I had educated guesses - but he had the tools, smarts and skills.

 

[stj]

nice.
i hope the roms end up public.

 

[caius]

Nowadays all people know that it's possible to run whatever CPS1 game on whatever combination of B-BOARD and C-BOARD.To use a different B-BOARD than original you have to adapt equations of the PAL @1A in order to generate correct /OE signals for the GFX ROMs (there is also a small program around which perform this).To use different C-BOARD you must, instead, hack the program code (specifically the various registers for layers, priority, etc..) to target the game to the different ASIC. Anyway you repairer didn't know that there is a Varth Japanese Resale revision which runs on a '91634B-2' B-BOARD (same of SF2CE but JEDEC so with 27C4096 GFX ROMs) along with CPS-B-21 C-BOARD

/* B-Board 91634B-2, Japan Resale Ver. */
ROM_START( varthjr )
ROM_REGION( CODE_SIZE, "maincpu", 0 ) /* 68000 code */
ROM_LOAD16_WORD_SWAP( "vaj_23b.8f", 0x00000, 0x80000, CRC(ad3d3522) SHA1(db627233f9d8a03c2d4bb31614951a0cdc81600d) )
ROM_LOAD16_WORD_SWAP( "vaj_22b.7f", 0x80000, 0x80000, CRC(034e3e55) SHA1(eeb85a827cf18dafbdf0a2828aa39128352857f3) )

ROM_REGION( 0x200000, "gfx", 0 )
ROMX_LOAD( "va_01.3a", 0x000000, 0x80000, CRC(b1fb726e) SHA1(5ac0876b6c49d0a99710dda68653664f4d8c1167) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-5m.7a
ROMX_LOAD( "va_02.4a", 0x000002, 0x80000, CRC(4c6588cd) SHA1(d14e8cf051ac934ccc989d8c571c6cc9eed34af5) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-7m.9a
ROMX_LOAD( "va_03.5a", 0x000004, 0x80000, CRC(0b1ace37) SHA1(6f9493c22f667f683db2789972fd16bb94724679) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-1m.3a
ROMX_LOAD( "va_04.6a", 0x000006, 0x80000, CRC(44dfe706) SHA1(a013a434df3161a91aafbb35dc4e20dfb3f177f4) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-3m.5a

ROM_REGION( 0x18000, "audiocpu", 0 ) /* 64k for the audio CPU (+banks) */
ROM_LOAD( "va_09.12a", 0x00000, 0x08000, CRC(7a99446e) SHA1(ca027f41e3e58be5abc33ad7380746658cb5380a) )
ROM_CONTINUE( 0x10000, 0x08000 )

ROM_REGION( 0x40000, "oki", 0 ) /* Samples */
ROM_LOAD( "va_18.11c", 0x00000, 0x20000, CRC(de30510e) SHA1(8e878696192606b76a3a0e53553e638d9621cff7) )
ROM_LOAD( "va_19.12c", 0x20000, 0x20000, CRC(0610a4ac) SHA1(3da02ea6a7a56c85de898806d2a1cf6bc526c1b3) )

ROM_REGION( 0x0200, "aboardplds", 0 )
ROM_LOAD( "buf1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(eb122de7) SHA1(b26b5bfe258e3e184f069719f9fd008d6b8f6b9b) )
ROM_LOAD( "ioa1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(59c7ee3b) SHA1(fbb887c5b4f5cb8df77cec710eaac2985bc482a6) )
ROM_LOAD( "prg1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(f1129744) SHA1(a5300f301c1a08a7da768f0773fa0fe3f683b237) )
ROM_LOAD( "rom1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(41dc73b9) SHA1(7d4c9f1693c821fbf84e32dd6ef62ddf14967845) )
ROM_LOAD( "sou1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(84f4b2fe) SHA1(dcc9e86cc36316fe42eace02d6df75d08bc8bb6d) )

ROM_REGION( 0x0200, "bboardplds", 0 )
ROM_LOAD( "va63b.1a", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(132ab7c5) SHA1(54b78b02cdd9430c90e2289d42585ee71cf71cdc) )
ROM_LOAD( "iob1.12d", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(3abc0700) SHA1(973043aa46ec6d5d1db20dc9d5937005a0f9f6ae) )
ROM_LOAD( "bprg1.11d", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(31793da7) SHA1(400fa7ac517421c978c1ee7773c30b9ed0c5d3f3) )

ROM_REGION( 0x0200, "cboardplds", 0 )
ROM_LOAD( "ioc1.ic1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(0d182081) SHA1(475b3d417785da4bc512cce2b274bb00d4cc6792) )
ROM_END

 

[SEGASHIRO]

Cool. Glad the info is out there!

 

[chunksin]

Nowadays all people know that it's possible to run whatever CPS1 game on whatever combination of B-BOARD and C-BOARD.To use a different B-BOARD than original you have to adapt equations of the PAL @1A in order to generate correct /OE signals for the GFX ROMs (there is also a small program around which perform this).To use different C-BOARD you must, instead, hack the program code (specifically the various registers for layers, priority, etc..) to target the game to the different ASIC. Anyway you repairer didn't know that there is a Varth Japanese Resale revision which runs on a '91634B-2' B-BOARD (same of SF2CE but JEDEC so with 27C4096 GFX ROMs) along with CPS-B-21 C-BOARD

/* B-Board 91634B-2, Japan Resale Ver. */
ROM_START( varthjr )
ROM_REGION( CODE_SIZE, "maincpu", 0 ) /* 68000 code */
ROM_LOAD16_WORD_SWAP( "vaj_23b.8f", 0x00000, 0x80000, CRC(ad3d3522) SHA1(db627233f9d8a03c2d4bb31614951a0cdc81600d) )
ROM_LOAD16_WORD_SWAP( "vaj_22b.7f", 0x80000, 0x80000, CRC(034e3e55) SHA1(eeb85a827cf18dafbdf0a2828aa39128352857f3) )

ROM_REGION( 0x200000, "gfx", 0 )
ROMX_LOAD( "va_01.3a", 0x000000, 0x80000, CRC(b1fb726e) SHA1(5ac0876b6c49d0a99710dda68653664f4d8c1167) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-5m.7a
ROMX_LOAD( "va_02.4a", 0x000002, 0x80000, CRC(4c6588cd) SHA1(d14e8cf051ac934ccc989d8c571c6cc9eed34af5) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-7m.9a
ROMX_LOAD( "va_03.5a", 0x000004, 0x80000, CRC(0b1ace37) SHA1(6f9493c22f667f683db2789972fd16bb94724679) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-1m.3a
ROMX_LOAD( "va_04.6a", 0x000006, 0x80000, CRC(44dfe706) SHA1(a013a434df3161a91aafbb35dc4e20dfb3f177f4) , ROM_GROUPWORD | ROM_SKIP(6) ) // == va-3m.5a

ROM_REGION( 0x18000, "audiocpu", 0 ) /* 64k for the audio CPU (+banks) */
ROM_LOAD( "va_09.12a", 0x00000, 0x08000, CRC(7a99446e) SHA1(ca027f41e3e58be5abc33ad7380746658cb5380a) )
ROM_CONTINUE( 0x10000, 0x08000 )

ROM_REGION( 0x40000, "oki", 0 ) /* Samples */
ROM_LOAD( "va_18.11c", 0x00000, 0x20000, CRC(de30510e) SHA1(8e878696192606b76a3a0e53553e638d9621cff7) )
ROM_LOAD( "va_19.12c", 0x20000, 0x20000, CRC(0610a4ac) SHA1(3da02ea6a7a56c85de898806d2a1cf6bc526c1b3) )

ROM_REGION( 0x0200, "aboardplds", 0 )
ROM_LOAD( "buf1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(eb122de7) SHA1(b26b5bfe258e3e184f069719f9fd008d6b8f6b9b) )
ROM_LOAD( "ioa1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(59c7ee3b) SHA1(fbb887c5b4f5cb8df77cec710eaac2985bc482a6) )
ROM_LOAD( "prg1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(f1129744) SHA1(a5300f301c1a08a7da768f0773fa0fe3f683b237) )
ROM_LOAD( "rom1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(41dc73b9) SHA1(7d4c9f1693c821fbf84e32dd6ef62ddf14967845) )
ROM_LOAD( "sou1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(84f4b2fe) SHA1(dcc9e86cc36316fe42eace02d6df75d08bc8bb6d) )

ROM_REGION( 0x0200, "bboardplds", 0 )
ROM_LOAD( "va63b.1a", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(132ab7c5) SHA1(54b78b02cdd9430c90e2289d42585ee71cf71cdc) )
ROM_LOAD( "iob1.12d", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(3abc0700) SHA1(973043aa46ec6d5d1db20dc9d5937005a0f9f6ae) )
ROM_LOAD( "bprg1.11d", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(31793da7) SHA1(400fa7ac517421c978c1ee7773c30b9ed0c5d3f3) )

ROM_REGION( 0x0200, "cboardplds", 0 )
ROM_LOAD( "ioc1.ic1", 0x0000, 0x0117, CRC(0d182081) SHA1(475b3d417785da4bc512cce2b274bb00d4cc6792) )
ROM_END

I've tried to write these roms today and tested them on a SF2 CE board set and I am getting perfect sounds from what I can tell but missing graphics layers. The board boots to a black screen and then shortly afterwards you see the 2 planes fly in from the left with explosions going off, all on a black background. The demo shows all of the sprites but again, no backgrounds as if the layer information in the program roms is not correct for the C board. Any ideas on how to get it fully working? I'm using a MASK ROM B-board with 27C400 swapping sockets 2 and 3.

 

[chunksin]

Thanks to @Apocalypse I got this working, I did a file compare between the varthj and varthjr romset and found roms 22 and 23 in the resale are layed out like this:

(40 and 34 interleaved)+(41 and 35 interleaved)
(42 and 36 interleaved)+(43 and 37 interleaved)

I used the patched desuicided files from DBS and it's now working fine

Files are here if you need them: drive.google.com/open?id=1j3YHmM6UJeM63vwkxFKSVEvp22Ak7r5y