Odd video issues on Master system games

[Chris]

I am experiencing a problem with the video quality on my Sega Master System game dumps. Namely Gangster Town, R-type, and Zillion 2 (the only 3 SMS games I own). The issue I am having is that each game appears to have the entire game screen shifted slightly to the right leaving a gap (approx. 1/4-1/2 inch) between the left side of the monitor and the actual game display. This does not appear to happen with the game's title screen, however, but once in the actual gameplay it begins to do this. I was experiencing this issue on my Sega Genesis (through the Powerbase Converter), but not on my Sega Game Gear (via the Master Gear Converter). I originally believed the issue to be the result of a hardware problem with my Genesis since it plays properly on the Game Gear, but now that the emulators are doing the same thing I am not really sure what to think of it. Gangster Town show the problem the most out of the three as the background actually is in the correct position and only the foreground is out of place.

The only thing I can think of is that the capacitors on the board inside the cartridge themselves may have gone bad. That or there may be a problem with the actual ROM chips themselves. But I find it unlikely that all 3 ROM chips would experience the same problem in the same way, so I am leaning more towards the capacitors due to their age. Still Wouldn't hurt to get a second opinion to see if there may be another possibility that I have not yet considered.

I am really looking forward to getting this issue solved and getting these games working properly as I never actually owned a Sega Master System when I was a kid and I would love to start picking up more SMS games. I am also concerned that I may experience the same issue with my Sega Game Gear games once I finish building an attachment I was working on for my SMS plugin using parts pulled from a broken SGG Game Genie.

It is also worth noting I have been experiencing an odd problem with copying the SMS games with my retrode as well. It seems, once I hook everything up, if I go to copy and paste the game file from the retrode to my PC then it will give me an error message stating that the file cannot be found. However, if I first open the configuration file and save it before attempting to copy the game file then the game file will be copied as normal. I don't know if this may have any correlation, but I thought I would add it just in case.

[Chris]

Come to think of it. I had to force the size on the games in copying too. I assume they must not contain header info regarding their size. I am not sure the sizes I got back from my research were right though. Could this issue be attributed to under dumping?

[MasterOfPuppets]

Here it says game size is in the header.

https://www.retrode.com/plug-in-adapters/

[Matthias_H]

Have you installed the latest firmware on your Retrode? Those plug-ins are fairly new, so your device may need an update from the factory-installed version.

[KingMike]

I do not have a Master System or games to verify myself but I have read that some SMS games (particularly larger games) will have a smaller size reported in the header to reduce the time it takes for the original BIOS to verify the cart.

[Chris]

No I have not updated the firmware. Where do I find the latest version and the instructions for how to perform the update?

[MasterOfPuppets]

Latest firmware: http://www.retrode.com/files/firmware/Retrode2-v0.18d-beta2.zip

Instructions: http://www.retrode.org/documentation/firmware/