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Namco system N2 failing to boot.

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antonioad14(TWON) said:
Lol, this is the gentleman I bought the machine from. For some reason they uploaded the listing on 2 different accounts, if you check the listing on their other account they already marked it as sold but they never updated that one for some reason. I acquired this machine sometime at the end of last year.
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ahhhhhhh
 
mathewbeall said:
$500 CAN for the cabinet alone is a great deal. Even if the N2 inside it is totally dead.
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Yeah it was also like 30 minutes away from my house, was a no brainer. If I'm unable to acquire a functioning N2 I assumed worst case scenario I can just throw my Triforce with Mario kart in there and call it a day.
 
So a bit of an update, after 2 months I received a board from Yaton (I know bad idea wanted to give him a fair shot), so I used a spare hard drive I had laying around (it's supposed to be a 3DX Asia) and upon booting it goes into the Namco screen but instead of powering down like the other one it freezes and this boot screen, seems it can happen at anytime. Once it did it part way through all the line of text and another it froze just before it's supposed to boot into the game on the screen I included in the picture. I have a 3DX+ Asia HDD he sent me but I have yet to test it out yet since I'm abit scared due to it still being cold since I just received it and wanted to give it some time to warm up before firing it up.
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Just tried out the HDD Yaton gave me and it actually worked, surprisingly he came in clutch, looks like that HDD I tried was just faulty.
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God DAMNIT, I went to plug it into the cabinet and upon booting it up it froze on the Nividia screen, upon waiting a bit and turning it off and on again I'm now back at the beginning being greeted by a "No Signal" again. Is my cabinet killing these things? Is that even possible?
 

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Okay so now luckily after giving it some time it's starting to turn on again, but now it seems to be freezing on this screen again. I guess I just got lucky when it decided to boot on my monitor upstairs? Weird cause I even let it play through the attract mode for a bit and it seemed fine. Why are these things so poorly built 😖. Why is it so hard just to see this thing running once on the cabinet 😭.
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So I let it sit for like 40 minutes tried it again and now it seems to be functioning near flawlessly, why is that the case?
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Played on it for over and hour and I'm happy to report that the cabinet Steering/forcefeedback, Shift, and audio is working as it should. Also had no issues with the game freezing or anything. I'm just concerned why it was freezing on the boot up like that, does it just not like getting turned on and off too quickly or something? Just worried about the long jevity of it at this point. People need to figure out a Multi boot solution for these N2's cause I feel the hard drives that are still out there working are on borrowed time.
 
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antonioad14(TWON) said:
Played on it for over and hour and I'm happy to report that the cabinet Steering/forcefeedback, Shift, and audio is working as it should. Played for over an hour and had no issues with the game freezing or anything. I'm just concerned why it was freezing on the boot up like that, does it just not like getting turned on and off too quickly or something? Just worried about the long jevity of it at this point. People need to figure out a Multi boot solution for these N2's cause I feel the hard drives that are still out there working are on borrowed time.
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In my experience - sometimes the usb key (which is used to decrypt the hard drive) doesn't always get read appropriately by the BIOS when booting up, so it can go into a reboot cycle or just freeze.

On one of my systems - I used a dab of deoxit on the usb port and cleaned it out really well to try and make sure the connection was as good as it could be - although the key was already a little loose. Sometimes just reinserting it a number of times did the trick also.

But that is my guess - weirdness with the usb decryption dongle.
 
Fun fact: only one single file is actually HASP enveloped--the factory setup script. The dongle is otherwise just used as a number to check once during the intermediary OS boot (purple Namco shell) and again at the game's attract loop. A good drive will boot to the Namco shell without a dongle (but won't go any further). The container decryption keys are enumerated entirely by a combination of hardware information. If you have the public bootloader rom dump, you can see the script that runs to enumerate the key.

Things are being worked on but everyone is very busy.
 
So that board that was giving me issues at the start of the thread that I needed to send back due to me not being able to get it working. apparently magically works for them now, honestly I find it very hard to believe that it would it start working again for no reason. At this point I don't even think I should ask for it back, but it would be nice to have 2 working units.
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I'm looking at the back of the monitor cause I'm curious on how to adjust the brightness of the monitor, I don't have much experience when it comes to opening up CRTs so I wanna be a bit careful, but does this little board with the switches have anything to do with it?
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I'm still getting the freezing sometimes during boot it's now sometimes happening in the screen when the steering gets calibrated, it mostly happens in the first attract screen but once I get into the actual game there's no more risk of it freezing anymore. Usually it'll take me 2 tries before I can get into the game fine without it freezing but now tonight it's been really annoying. Sometimes I'll boot it up now and it'll stay at a "no signal", the Namco N2 looks like its still on and even the dongles are lighting up, have no idea why it's doing this. I've tried like over 9 times and couldn't successfully get it to boot up once and it's really starting to annoy me.
 
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Yep, I'm starting to think it died again. I think Turning it on and off again might of screwed up the GPU or something I gotta look into this, now I'm not able to get past the no signal again. I'll give it some time and hopefully it works out.
 

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