Strikers boots with garbled graphics sound and gameplay seem to work fine but moving sprites are bad. Reflowed all c rom pins per some fb advice, next step? Anyone willing to fix?
Make sure you clean up the cartridge contacts really good if you have not already.
If any of the data coming from the Crom's isnt getting through all the way you can get graphical glitching.
So a common fault point may very well be the contacts on the cart them self.
Also just to try to clarify things for anyone else looking into this. Do you have this issue with any other MVS carts or just this one?
Hmmm this is starting to go beyond my repair experience since I only repaired Neo Geo motherboards not carts.
It could be a number of things in which I am not experienced troubleshooting on a cartridge yet.
You may need to reburn new C rom's or there could be a bad trace, or component.
Could also be the custom Neo CMC chip at worse, which looking that up on NeoGeo Dev wiki says its some kind of decryption/scrambling chip. Could be wrong about that though. https://wiki.neogeodev.org/index.php?title=NEO-CMC
Edit: The CMC chip does seem to scramble/decrypt graphical data so this cannot be ruled out it seems. This would be a worse case scenario though.
Maybe someone else in the community has some better ideas about tracking down the root cause here?
Never had to do any cartridge repairs :/
Its good to know that the problem is narrowed down only to the cartridge though, that can eliminate a myriad of other issues involving the motherboard.
Have you tried pushing the cartridge into the slot and then pulling it out for a couple of mm to make better contact? I have a Metal Slug X cartridge which only work this way.
If the edge connector is clean and undamaged, and the PCB traces are undamaged, and the solder connections are good and the ROMs are good then the only thing left that could cause a problem is the CMC... and if that's bad the only way to fix it is with another CMC from another Strikers cart.
I gotta say though, that edge connector LOOKs dirty, and I've had edge connectors that look clean end up being dirty enough to cause problems.
I always clean my cartridges like @twistedsymphony describe before I insert them into my MVS board. I would give it a try.
As ghetto variant you can use the "corner" of a folded paper to scrub the connectors and then use a little isopropyl alcohol for cleaning. Here are an example: