[FIXED!] Car Marty woes.......

[SuperDeadite]

So I pulled out my Car Marty MVP-10 for a video capture, hadn't used it in like 6 months. Last time I was using it, it ran like a champ.  Today at first all was fine, played a game for about 30 mins, then the system froze up.  So naturally I hit reset, and then nothing.  Ejected the disk, reset and then the bios came up as usual.  And now the damn thing won't boot CDs anymore.  XD

With the cover off, if I insert a CD sometimes it does nothing, sometimes it spins up.  If it's doing nothing and I give the CD a flick with a finger, it will then spin up like normal...

Either way it sees the disk and attempts to boot the game but after it gets to the data loading screen, it always fails after about 10 seconds and the disk stops spinning.   With a music CD, it will play about 3 seconds of a track then stop spinning.

Any ideas?  It's like the machine just decided to end it's own life mid-game....fuck

[SuperDeadite]

Just gave it another try.  It managed to boot up a game, but then locked up at the title screen....
However I was able to get an audio CD to play.  And while music came out, it had some it added some strange static and popping noises to it.   After the first track, it died on the 2nd.

[EdOscuro]

Dying motor maybe?  Fujitsu was reportedly pretty proud of the low-cost motors they used and maybe that's to blame.

I haven't used mine in a while, so with luck I'll hunt it down again and check it out.

[SuperDeadite]

And it works again!  Due to the odd way it was acting I suspected SRAM corruption.  So left it unplugged for a good 6 hours, and now it works perfectly again.  I've had this happen on Towns PCs, but never seen it on a Marty unit.

By the way, when I took the thing apart I was very surprised to find out that the Car Marty actually uses one of those nasty lithium barrel batteries on the mobo!  It does not use the coin-cell type like all the Towns PCs and normal Martys do.  Mine shows no sign of leaking, but damn, gonna have to get that removed soon.  It's less then 1cm away from the CPU.  Why the hell did they not use a coin cell? 

[EdOscuro]

Thanks for the heads-up on that.  I'd better take a look at mine too - don't want that stupid battery wiping out the system!