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Post by SignOfZeta on Jan 24, 2019 0:23:28 GMT
From my experience they don’t. However people who have thousands of HuCARDs around are going to see statistical aberrations normal users won’t. I’ve certainly heard of PC Genjin 2 dying but I’ve heard it enough to tell that it was obviously defective. It also sold really well, has several revisions, and actually gets played unlike all the Shada and Money Changer cards that few people have touched since they were on the charts.
Laserdisc is the most rot prone format I know of. I have over 650 titles, some as many as 13 discs each, and I’ve only ever seen rot once in my 25+ years of collecting LD. Others seem to find it every day but it can be hard to gauge this because from my experience noobs will call ANY defect on an LD rot. I’d say %90 or LD rot reports are just the user not knowing WTF he’s saying.
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Post by dshadoff on Jan 24, 2019 1:01:17 GMT
OK, since I was recently extracting images of all my cards (and I've been around the PC Engine a long long time), here is my two cents:
Basically, they are pretty solid, but I have seen some problems.
1) Outright abuse. I've seen some tormented card here in North America, and from the Hong Kong market (but Japan generally takes care of them). Enough traums will damage them internally. I've also seen one or two "zapped" by cartridge copiers which had their power supply polarities reversed... so I'd still call this abuse. I haven't seen electrical damage on legitimate hardware.
2) Contacts need cleaning. Since they're gold-plated, this was hardly ever a problem in the old days, but I had to clean about 20% of my cards in order to get a good read this time.
3) Some cards are a hair's beadth too thin - or the connectors don't supply enough even pressure across all of the pins. This can sometimes be improved by putting a strip (or two) of tape across the back side of the card, on the edge that inserts into the card-edge connector.
4) internal connection problem - this generally shows up on a single address or data line at first, but it will render the game pretty much inoperable. Can only be diagnosed after the contacts on both the card and game machine connector have been ruled out. Shows up as data issues with a very characteristic pattern of blocks, columns, or bits (depending on whether it's an address or data line issue).
5) I started another thread about bit-rot, which is a real possibility, but should be counted in terms of bits per (10 to a certain exponent) of byte-years. My collection is probably about 3,000,000,000 byte-years (total number of bytes time number of years since manufacture), and I had a few image-extraction errors, even after cleaning etc.
6) Manufacturing defect or poor tolerances - the Games Express cards are definitely built to lower quality target than the official HuCards, and the Chinese knock-offs are even lower-grade than that.
7) Battery-backed carts (Tennokoe Bank, Populous) may be failing because the batteries died (and potentially capacitor problems)
What shouldn't be the case:
Pretty much all of the PC Engine stuff was built before the RoHS standards came in, in the early 2000's - which specified that lead solder was no longr allowable in most things (and the early replacement solders often had brittle/broken connections), so there shouldn't be any of this sort of stuff.
Also, we often talk about capacitors going bad because they're mostly oil-filled electrolytic cap's; again, in the early 2000's, there were huge rashes of poor-quality capacitors where the electrolyte destabilized too quickly (Chinese manufacturing plants took formulas of electrolytes from Japanese factories, but couldn't make the stabilizer). But again, this was after the PC Engine era, so should not be the case.
Dave
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Post by SignOfZeta on Jan 24, 2019 1:51:41 GMT
Yeah. I should have said that I have seen dead pirate cards, just not legit ones.
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Post by nectarsis on Jan 24, 2019 2:09:34 GMT
My first copy of Outrun was in amazing shape. Beautiful label and bright, shiny pins. But it wouldn't work no matter what I did or what system or converter I tried it on. I did notice a very tiny scratch of one of the pins but I'm not sure if that was the culprit. I ended up selling it to Nectarsis. He made it into a necklace haha I still need to get to that before MGC lol.
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Gex
Gun-headed
Facebook Name: Ryley Rolls
Posts: 58
Currently Playing: Dragon Slayer 2
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Post by Gex on Jan 24, 2019 6:05:39 GMT
For some reason i've always had the game Cadash die on me. I've had 4 hucards alone not work, meanwhile the mountain of Keith Courages I have probably all work fine
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Post by spenoza on Jan 24, 2019 15:04:47 GMT
That sucks! Cadash is such a good game, too.
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Gex
Gun-headed
Facebook Name: Ryley Rolls
Posts: 58
Currently Playing: Dragon Slayer 2
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Post by Gex on Jan 24, 2019 18:51:12 GMT
Cadash is such a good game, too. Pretty much the only game review Chris Bucci did that I didn't really agree with. Cadash is A+, except when the glitches happen.
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TailChao
Gun-headed
I Must Eat Muffin Gear.
Posts: 68
Fave PCE Game Overall: Bonk's Adventure
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Post by TailChao on Jan 24, 2019 20:07:07 GMT
Keep in mind these little cards were consumer electronics and some are now over thirty years old. I don't think either NEC or Hudson were considering functionality that far off.
All electronics will age and fail eventually, period. How long that takes and whether or not it is repairable depends upon a bunch of factors. Stuff like PC-Genjin 2 commonly going bad could just be from a less than stellar batch of ROM dies. They worked, just not as long as the others - process could have been nonideal, who knows. But I don't think it's something to worry about, just enjoy the games.
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Post by soop on Jan 24, 2019 20:29:02 GMT
But I don't think it's something to worry about, just enjoy the games. Maybe not, but it's certainly interesting. And if we know more about it, we might be able to preserve them better
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TailChao
Gun-headed
I Must Eat Muffin Gear.
Posts: 68
Fave PCE Game Overall: Bonk's Adventure
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Post by TailChao on Jan 24, 2019 21:12:04 GMT
Maybe not, but it's certainly interesting. And if we know more about it, we might be able to preserve them better Well yeah, if every copy of one game goes bad over time - that's no fun. Lifespan of electronics being interesting? Absolutely, that's a whole field in itself. I guess a better way to put it is that Mask ROMs can last a very long time, and they usually will. The can and usually are the important things here, and the lifespan numbers are often high enough that we're able to ignore preserving data for a long time. But they're not going to last forever, and it's extremely difficult to estimate exactly how long. The only way to extend the lifespan of a die as much as possible is just put the card in a temperature controlled dark room and never move or play it. But again, that's still not a guarantee it will work forever. So you may as well just use it as intended. Just be nice to your cards, I guess.
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Post by soop on Jan 24, 2019 22:37:45 GMT
I own a dead copy of Gunhed special edition, it's definitely worth my while to research as much as possible!
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Post by seieienbu on Jan 26, 2019 7:55:43 GMT
Yeah. My copy of Jackie Chan is dead. I have it lying around and would love to have it spring back to life but I think it's likely gone forever. I sure wish that it was something like Keith Courage that had died instead.
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TailChao
Gun-headed
I Must Eat Muffin Gear.
Posts: 68
Fave PCE Game Overall: Bonk's Adventure
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Post by TailChao on Jan 26, 2019 14:25:04 GMT
Sometimes you can actually save old Mask ROMs if the data line drivers got messed up by adding pullups or pulldowns, but there's not much room to add any patches to a HuCard. If one of the bond wires from the chip die popped off you're pretty screwed.
Have there been similar failures in other cards from that time like the Sega Cards or Bee Cards?
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Post by AggieTsubi on Jan 26, 2019 15:17:29 GMT
I can't remember which offhand, but I have a PC Engine sports game that I could just never get to work, no matter how thoroughly I cleaned it. I'll have to try that tape trick to see if it makes any difference. I have encountered worn down contacts before. I once had a Pokemon Stadium 2 for N64 that had strangely thin pins, and I couldn't for the life of me get it to work.
I've been flummoxed by Youkai Douchuuki too. I tend to use my multitap all the time, just as a small cable extension, but I eventually figured out the game's compatibility issue.
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Post by bigusschmuck on Jan 26, 2019 17:08:13 GMT
For some reason i've always had the game Cadash die on me. I've had 4 hucards alone not work, meanwhile the mountain of Keith Courages I have probably all work fine So does it randomly freeze on you? Or just stop working outright? Getting me a little concerned with my Turbo copy of Cadash.
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