Issues playing Homebrew cartridges

[Buck999]

I purchased a copy of A.R.T.I. at PRGE a couple of weeks ago. When I got home, I popped the cartridge into my 7800 console, but nothing happened - all I got was a white, yellow, orange or black screen. I tried cleaning the cart, but still the same results. I contacted Alberrt and he had me ship the cart back to him and he issued me a new one, but when I popped it into my system, I got the same results. Other cartriges/homebrews work in my console, but ARTI will not work. Has anyone else been having issues?

 

Here is a video showing what is happening:

 

 

[+-^CrossBow^-]

Wonder if it is something similar to what I saw with a copy of Popeye that wouldn't work in a 7800 sent to me for service work. I actually had to add the deglitch cap to it similar to what I've seen on factory bodged ones from back in the day. After I did that...Popeye came up and starting working.

 

[+Dark Descent]

I saw another post with someone having issues with this cart too.  I believe they had it replaced. 

[tkarner]

Any ideas if this is a problem with the ARTI carts or an incompatibility with certain 7800 revisions? Kind of like Kung Fu Master, which doesn't work with some 7800s (mine included). I'm planning to order ARTI as soon as it's available online, so I hope it'll work with my 7800.

[+-^CrossBow^-]

More of an issue with some specific revision of 7800s or I should say, specific components that could be in use on a 7800. 

 

One interesting thing I can tell you is that I have a 7800 here right now that works... but both versions of BallBlazer I own would not run stable on it. One would crash right after the encryption check and the other would crash the system after about 5 - 10min of game play. But all other games I played seemed to work just fine.

 

I popped the Rockwell CPU out of it last night and put it on my chip tester and that CPU pretty much failed every part of the test there is?! Stuck a Synertek NOS CPU I have on hand into it and it was fine after that. It would load up and play the early revision of BallBlazer at least but still ended up locking up at some point after about an hour. But the other version of BallBlazer was fine.

 

The point is that it could be a number of different things that can cause this and many of these newer homebrews really push this aging hardware to its absolute limits for even when they were new 40 years ago. 

 

[juansolo]

There's a huge amount of variability across the 7800. I think they used what they had and set the machines up (timing wise and what have you) to what they were using at that point. Giving us the situation we have now where odd things behave differently on different 7800s and there are a multitude of different bodges that are out there on different machines. It's why there's no one simple fix for everything as well sadly.