Quote Originally Posted by leonk
Quote Originally Posted by omnedon
The MCM/Ebay ones hold carts in a DEATH GRIP, and have a 1 in 4 fail rate with the NTF2 diagnostic cartridge, in my tests.
I'm not sure why the NTF2 cart will show a problem while others will not.

From a technical stand point (after experimenting with mine and reproducing many other carts) the NTF2 is nothing but a standard cart. In fact, there should be many carts on the market that will fail while the NTF2 passes (because there are pins that are not connected on the NTF2 but are on other carts).

A good example of a cart that's loaded to the max is SMB3. It uses a lot more pins than the NTF2 (because it uses more output address lines 256k NTFS vs 2048k SMB3!).

It could be that you just have an NTF2 cart with very sensitive (i.e. thin) PCB.

Apart from that, it doesn't do anything above and beyond a standard cart (i.e. no special added hardware or traces).
i've brought this up to omnedon myself through PM. my NTF2 works extremely well on a number of systems, where other carts will not. of course, mine's not a standard one (as omnedon and leonk know).

leonk: since mine is based off an SMB3 board is it slightly different from omnedon's, based on what you've mentioned above about SMB3 boards?