MiSTer FPGA Forum

A couple days ago I turned on my Mister and tried to play Battle Garegga. I launched the game, but no dice: black screen. Next I tried X-men vs Street Fighter, which only displayed garbled graphics when launched. I tried Zaxxon next, which booted and played fine

After testing a few other games and encountering more black screens and garbled graphics I formatted my card and started from scratch. I launched Battle Garegga, but again, black screen.

I ran a memory test for two hours, which appears to show errors.


Basically, any core that requires ram doesn’t work, and the cores that don’t require ram, work. I have little technical aptitude, but it looks to me like I need a new SDRAM board. Am I correct? Is there something I’m overlooking? Everything was working perfectly the day before I encountered these problems, and I made no changes to the INI settings.

The memory test core does indeed show errors, it has downclocked the SDRAM all the way to 70MHz and is still showing errors.

First I suggest unplugging the SDRAM board and then plug it again and run the memory test, just to eliminate the possibility of a bad contact on the pin header of the DE10-Nano and SDRAM boards 40 pin connector. If the test results remain the same I would expect the SDRAM board has a fault.

Thank you, I will try that.

Where did you get the ram?

Do you have a metal case on your mister? Without it, it is prone to ESD damage.

Yes try unplug/plug in a couple of times, because if there are some crap/etc it can take more then one time to get rid of all.
I would probably also check both the RAM and DE-10 boards closely for any crap that potentially could cause a short/or some electricity creeping between pins/solder joints.
Probably worth trying both since it won´t take long!

If you are in Europe and if you need help with repair just ask. I do it in few mins. Not asking money

Kind regards
Ricardo

I’ll have to open it up to see what ram model is used — it’s a prebuilt from ultimatemister I purchased several years ago. As I said, the unit worked perfectly up till now, and I have absolutely no reason to question the build quality (I’ve purchased 2 from ultimatemister and they’ve both been great). I’ll be checking to see if the board came lose when I have a little time away from my toddlers.

Well, I opened it up, removed the ram board, remounted it, and tried running some arcade games: same results (nothing requiring SDRAM works, memory test errors). I ordered a new board. Thank you all for your help!