Maxx Play 85-in-1 PNP

[tz101]

I picked up this cheap Chinese plug n play gaming unit from GW today. It is called a Maxx Play 85-in-1 and appears to be made by some company called VS Maxx. Seems to be one of the infamous pirate units with NOAC architecture, but I have never seen any of the games on the thing before so am guessing they are Famicom titles, and not US NES releases since I have a substantial NES cart library and would recognize those games.

 

In any case, the unit has some problems. Mainly, when I power it up it goes through the intro screen fine, then progresses to a screen showing a layout of the controller button functions. After that it goes to a scrolling menu screen whereby the user is supposed to be able to select which of the 96 (?) games he/she wants to play. This scrolling menu is messed up in that I cannot see the cursor as I move it over the different game titles. I can hear an audible dinging noise, but no visual to know exactly which game I am over with the cursor.

 

Finally, after blindly selecting a game, the unit goes to that game's Famicom start-up screen. On that screen, again, I cannot see the cursor that I am moving over the various menu options (1 player, 2 player, options, etc.). So I blindly hit the controller's "start" button but once the action starts I cannot see my onscreen avatar to know where I'm going. All the background graphics in each individual game seem to be fine, along with audio, but my character is nowhere to be found. So obviously I die an early death.

 

I took this controller/game console apart, thinking maybe there would be something obvious I could see, but it is not so easy to tell. For starters, this is a Nintendo on a chip console, but there is no chip that I can tell on the system board. Just a PCB with some resistors, controller button contact points, and a fuse.

 

Does anyone have any insight into NOAC type pirate game systems and how this might be fixed? Thanks.