So this time around we have a Neo Geo MVS board. The MVS is an arcade motherboard designed to accept cartridges instead of ROM chips or replacement daughterboards. This is to make the machine design simpler and allow operators to swap games more easily. In addition to that, there are also multi-cart MVS systems that allowed arcade operators to place more than one game in a cabinet at a time. This allowed them to make more money in less space.
SNK was definitely ahead of their time in a lot of ways.
Unfortunately, time has not been kind to this board. The Lithium battery that is used for RAM backup is leaking fluid all over the board. If left unchecked, the board will eventually be damaged to to the point where it will no longer function. In this tutorial, I replaced the lithium battery with one that I had in my parts drawer. Unfortunately, I did not have the exact same battery. What I did have however was a battery that was about half a volt higher in voltage over the one it replaced. I did not believe this would be that big of a deal, and after about a week of solid usage, I am feeling pretty confident to say that this is an adequate replacement. If you do choose to do the swap while following the tutorial below though, you should probably use a VG2430 instead of the 3.6v COMP-16-10 that I used. Still, it should work just fine even if you choose to do so.
I also decided to upgrade the BIOS. With CPS2 boards, I've already shown how to change the ROMs to Phoenix'd ones, essentially eliminating the suicide battery issue that those specific boards. In this case, the same guy, Razoola, has made a BIOS update that adds fast region switching, a game cheats engine, a jukebox, and memory patching, to the Neo Geo AES and MVS. In this tutorial, I also show you how to update the MVF-1Z's BIOS with a simple chip pulling procedure.
Because this video is longer, I tried to keep the humor slightly higher than normal and keep the pace up.
Enjoy!