Initial D 3 Naomi Reader Woes...

[jbean3535]

I have been pulling my hair out over this issue for the past few months and am at my wit's end.

I've got a US Initial D 3 Twin cabinet that has 2 confirmed working card readers. The left cabinet works great, no errors, prints cards, no issues. The right cabinet initially had a weird "looping" issue, where the card reader would just loop and loop at boot, resulting in a "CARD R/W ERROR" upon boot. Messed with the 5v line and managed to get it to stop looping and it appeared to work properly, but still gave the error when booting. Going into the service menu and initializing the reader now gives a "CONNECTION ERROR"

I have now done the following with no luck (Issue stays with the cabinet):
-Swap Naomi 2 units
-Swap PSUs
-Swap card readers
-Swap card reader harness
-Completely removed the harness and checked it out for physical damage
-Removed the notoriously bad Molex connectors and replaced them
-Ensured the reader has plenty of cards

Has anyone had this issue, and if so, what in the world did you do to get it fixed? I've seen a couple of threads on other forums via Google searching, but none of them have real solutions within them.

 

[nismopunch]

I had this same issue when I was running ID3 a long time ago on only the left side, and I never figured it out. Completely replacing the card reader harness helped for a bit, but then the looping became intermittent so did not always happen, and always the same cabinet not the reader as you mentioned. Curious to see if anyone chimes in on this since I never figured it out either.

There are emulated card solutions out there, but if you are trying to stay original that won't help.

 

[nem]

Possibly a combination of things and not one single thing. As tiring as it sounds, just keep swapping things and eventually you'll find it.

 

[jbean3535]

At this point, I don't really know what else I can swap. I did all the other little various boards last night with no luck. I'm still trucking along with it though. It doesn't help that it takes seemingly 45 minutes to boot every time I turn it on haha

@nismopunch - The "looping" issue appears to be pinned down to the 5V pot on the PSU needing a slight adjustment.

I've considered emulating it, but with multiple people playing, it starts to become a chore (That, and I just purchased a NOS box of 200 cards). I'll keep the thread updated on what I can figure out.

 

[nismopunch]

That setup gave me no end of frustration to keep running lol. For me I tried that as well but it would always come back even with different PSUs/adjustments.

Best of luck @jbean3535 , I hope you nail it down!