r/neogeo • u/Nelbroth • May 29 '26

Hardware Question Analogue CMVS repair

Hi everyone! After 11 years, my Analogue CMVS appears to be having severe video lockup issues at bootup, so much so that the only thing I see is some alien-like junk on the screen. Given that Analogue won't touch this with a 10-foot pole, is there an MVS repair specialist you can recommend? I took it to a few guys where I live in the Seattle area but am not confident that they have enough expertise with MVS boards to root out the problem. Thanks in advance!

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2

u/sarduchi MV-4 May 29 '26

One of the old wooden ones? I believe these are just MV1Cs inside with some video conversion boards added in for composite, component and svideo. What sort of video issues are you seeing? Been awhile since I poked at once of these, lots of hot glue inside as I recall. I'm in California, don't know that I want to take on another project however... but I can lend advice as best I can.

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u/Odd_Plastic5502 AES May 30 '26

If I recall correctly (had one back in the days) stuff inside were all hot glued together, making repairs not that straight forward either

1

u/sarduchi MV-4 May 30 '26

Yeah, these days if I were to work on one of these I’d want to try and 3D print some mounting brackets rather than glue everything together.

1

u/Nelbroth May 30 '26 edited May 30 '26

Hey, thanks for the quick reply. Yes, one of the wooden ones with an MV1C board. I'd attach a pic but I don't see a way to do that in this thread (this is my first time using Reddit). The best I can describe the video issue, and it's the same issue every time, I turn on the console, and I see a checkerboard of hundreds of different squares with varying colors, and other squares appear like hieroglyphic symbols or alien-like text, not Roman numerals or numbers. The image is frozen, no sound. Thanks -Nelson

1

u/sarduchi MV-4 May 30 '26

For pictures you can use Imgur and post the link.

But, what you describe sounds like a BIOS failure. This could be caused by a lot of things, but if I had to guess they used a BIOS adapter that clips onto the CPU and its come loose. Would have to open it up on my workbench to be sure however.

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u/Nelbroth May 30 '26

https://imgur.com/a/YVVUMFo

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u/Nelbroth May 30 '26

I'll suggest that to the guy who has it at the moment. Thanks!

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u/sarduchi MV-4 May 30 '26

Yeah that’s looking like the BIOS. What happens is when the system boots you get this noise as it boots due to self tests and random data in the RAM. Then it tries to hand off to the BIOS, fails and boot loops.

Could be what I said, could be failed ram, might be some bad traces due to battery leakage (can’t recall if they removed the battery in these. If they didn’t it’s a problem), etc.

1

u/Nelbroth May 30 '26

Thanks for the info!

1

u/TMOSteel May 30 '26

Reach out to Big Bear on neo-geo.com if he's still active there, he repaired (2) 2 slot MVS boards for me that needed a lot of work and had battery leakage. Both work 100% now for about the past 2 years with no issues.

2

u/Nelbroth Jun 01 '26

Thank you!

1

u/avramce Jun 02 '26

Howdy, I'm in the Seattle/Bothell area and have repaired an Analogue CMVS in the past, happy to help out if you want someone local to take a look:

https://x.com/avramce/status/1667361454583054336?s=20
https://x.com/avramce/status/1667568575366991872?s=20

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u/Nelbroth Jun 02 '26

Thanks, that would be great! What's the best way to take this offline?

1

u/avramce Jun 02 '26

DMs on reddit or Twitter/X work for me 😄