Hacking EZ Flash IV Problems

[kmno]

So after some time not playing A Link to the Past I decided yesterday to give it a go, I turned on my Micro, bootted the game and oh surprise my file was clean. I thought I may have not played the game or maybe erased the file myself long ago so I said what the hell lets play.

I started a new file and all was going well, I finished playing for the day and turned off the Micro. Today I tried to continue and to my surprise there was no save file! It was clean, so obviously I tried to figure what to do, long story short I erased the game, used the client to add the rom again, added my backup savefile and nothing. The game wouldn't reset even when I made sure to click on the box on the client. Then after two or three tries when I turned on the Micro it even gave me an error message before loading the OS, and after that it gave me a message about a FAT error or something like that.

I'm only having this problem with this rom, but it is strange as it is the first time I've had the problem, before I could add the rom, patch it and even have the reset without problems, so what is happening? Is it software? Hardware? I even formated the SD to make sure it was not a problem with the card but it gave me the same problems. Anyone can help me?

 

[FAST6191]

Interesting.

On the one hand it sounds like you have a dead battery. You say another error happened though and not "first in or battery dry" or something like that, if it is FAT then that might be nicer as you can avoid soldering in a battery.

FAT error then. Are you using a microSD to miniSD adapter? I see this sort of thing often enough with that, even if it previously worked.

Can you try playing another game (so as to make a save), rebooting, restoring your zelda save, playing zelda and then seeing if the save is back. It sounds like it did not happen but several times now I have seen people have the old save in the SRAM overwrite their newly copied save.

All this said yeah it would be a first for zelda to do this rather than some hardware quirk.

 

[Jayro]

I have a microSD to miniSD adapter with mine, and after using it twice, a pin inside the adapter got bent... had to take it apart and fix it, using only a knife blade. After that though, Just leave the GBA micro with a ROM playing, paused, so the GBA can charge the internal SRAM battery.

After I'm done playing a game and save, I immediately reboot my Gameboy SP so it writes the save file. Then I could care less if the battery runs dry.

 

[kmno]

I hope it is not a dead battery, I didn't have problems with any other rom I already had (I tried different ones to check this) though yesterday I forgot to add, I added Capcom Classics Mini Mix and it gave me the same error, so I erased the rom and it was ok. While googling what could be the problem I found old posts from here about the lenght of the rom name and that sometimes it caused problems with the save file, though I thought that was already fixed.

Anyway I reduced the name and right now I'm not having problems but I'll wait and see how this develops, I'll try playing several roms and rebooting to see if this causes me problems and I'll try to add more roms and see if It show the error message or not. Also the card is a microSD 2GB.

 

[Deleted-236924]

The internal battery running dry shouldn't matter if you use the in-game soft reset key combo to return back to the EZ-Flash IV menu, since this should automatically backup the SRAM to the miniSD without having to perform a power cycle.
If save files are still disappearing despite of that, then the problem probably lies elsewhere.

After that though, Just leave the GBA micro with a ROM playing, paused, so the GBA can charge the internal SRAM battery.

That only works with the earlier batches of EZ-Flash IV; the newer ones don't have a rechargeable battery.

 

[kmno]

That's another problem I can't soft reset, I don't know why but even when I run the rom through the client and tick the reset option it doesn't allow me to do that in game, I'm kinda confused by this whole thing because it is recent, I've never encountered this problem before.

 

[Jayro]

That only works with the earlier batches of EZ-Flash IV; the newer ones don't have a rechargeable battery.

How can I tell if mine is older or newer, are there distinguishing markings somewhere on or in the cart? O.O

 

[Deleted-236924]

I heard that the plastic wrapping thing on the battery would be orange-ish on rechargeable ones and yellow on non-rechargeables, but I can't confirm.

 

[kmno]

Well after some days I checked if my save file was still there and it is intact, even after using other games, seems the problem was with the name length which I made shorter, still the soft reset function does not work.