Hacking nesDS-on-SCDS1-freezes awareness: anyone???

[Searinox]

I don't know how many of you know, nor if it's team SC's fault or the nesDS developer, but there are freezing problems with nesDS on SCDS-1.

I've never been able to get ROMs to work right up til now. The only ROM that would load was Ski or Die, the Zeldas would freeze it. Sometimes just browsing the folder would make it get stuck, and loading save states was out of the question.

I've since come to believe it's a problem of Supercard in conjunction with some memories, particularly big ones. So I formatted my memory with 64K cluster, downloaded an alternate DLDI patcher, and FINALLY I am able to get some functionality out of this thing.

I can load Ski or Die, possibly because it has no SRAM save. AFTER loading SoD, I am able to load every single other ROM without any issues with savestates or SRAM saving of any sort. But STILL if I try and load a SRAM-saving game DIRECTLY from nesDS the first time it starts up, it will lock up.

My question is why can't I find any documentation about these issues anywhere, aside from random posts popping up on Google from other people's experiences? They seem to definately be a problem.

 

[Destructobot]

I was never able to get nesDS to work at all when I ran it from the SCDS1 menu. It would always hang before even getting to the list of games. The only solution I found was to run it from YSmenu; when I did that it behaved as it should.

As for your actual question, I don't know. A lot of Supercard users seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to the SCDS1's problems. I've never considered running things from an alternate menu and giving up the features I bought the SCDS1 for to be an acceptable solution.

 

[Searinox]

I was never able to get nesDS to work at all when I ran it from the SCDS1 menu. It would always hang before even getting to the list of games. The only solution I found was to run it from YSmenu; when I did that it behaved as it should.

As for your actual question, I don't know. A lot of Supercard users seem to have their heads in the sand when it comes to the SCDS1's problems. I've never considered running things from an alternate menu and giving up the features I bought the SCDS1 for to be an acceptable solution.

If you kindly have the time to test this out I would be grateful, because I don't want to run around claiming to have found a solution which doesn't work for everyone. http://dldi.drunkencoders.com/uploads/1/16/Scdssdhc1.dldi This is the DLDI, it's to be renamed to dldi.bin and placed over the original file in /scshell/. Also 64K cluster is needed. That should fix the folder browsing at least. If ROMs do not load, try loading one that does not make a SRAM save, like Super Mario Bros. 1, and then load all the others. If I could get it to work I hope it proves a solution to you too...

 

[granville]

I have a similar issue with SnemulDS. I can play all working games perfectly and use SRAM saves, but savestates completely garble the sound and freeze the thing in a few seconds. The only way to get savestates working is by disabling sound, and it still isn't very stable. I tried manually patching DLDI AND the auto patch built into the firmware to no avail.

But the strange thing is that I never had an issue with NESDS. It works perfectly.

I used DLDIRC to patch these if that's any help.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Savestates have always been buggy in SNEmulDS for me. Even if they work, it usually plays the same music no matter what area of the game I'm in, or crash entirely. I don't think it's a card-specific thing.

 

[granville]

Savestates have always been buggy in SNEmulDS for me. Even if they work, it usually plays the same music no matter what area of the game I'm in, or crash entirely. I don't think it's a card-specific thing.

Well, I don't know of all the details, but savestates worked somewhat on R4. Or at least it did for some games such as Mario World. On the DKC series, it usually crashed when you changed scenes. But on the DS-One, they never work.

 

[Searinox]

On the topic of SNEmulDS, I never had any such problems. Music loops from the beginning when loading states but everything else works fine. I can actually say it's working better than on the R4 and AK2 because on those if you tried to load Chrono Trigger while having an EZflash in for extra RAM it would white screen. With the SC OS it works fine. What version of the SC OS are you using?

 

[granville]

I'm using the latest DS-One firmware which I believe is called:

SuperCard DS ONE(SDHC) OS 3.0 SP4(0718)

And that problem where Chrono Trigger would freeze with extra ram added can be easily remedied by going into Snemul.cfg file and editing a value under MapMemoryExp (or something like that). Then you can load the 4MB roms fine. I used to have the same problem with the DKC trilogy.

Don't have a clue why yours automatically worked when you switched to the DS-One...

 

[Destructobot]

I did some testing, and got some interesting results. First, these problems with nesDS seem to be limited to SDHC cards. I can load Zelda 2 on my generic 1GB microSD card without any problem, but I get the same behavior you described when I tried to load the game on my 4GB A-Data microSDHC card. I also don't have the problem with nesDS locking up when going into a folder with roms in it when I run it from a standard SD card.

It turns out that problem was caused by having too many roms in the folders. On the standard SD card (or any card in the CycloDS Evolution) I can go into a folder with hundreds of roms in it, but with an SDHC card on the SCDS1 it has problems if there are more than 80 roms in the folder. If there are just a few more than 80 it will let me go into the folder and scroll through the list, but if I try to load a game or go into a different folder it locks up. If there are a lot more than 80, it locks up as soon as I press A on the folder.

Once I got that figured out, I had pretty much the same results you described. Most roms wouldn't load from the SDHC card with the default DLDI file, but when I used the one you linked to I could load most of them without trouble.


Both memory cards are formatted by the Panasonic SD formatter.

 

[Searinox]

I onlt have three ROMs in my folder. Anyway I am now able to use nesDS normally, provided I load a game that doesn't have SRAM before loading anything else. I noticed it's SDHC related too.

 

[pman1902]

hello all,

i got a ttds card with sandisk 4gb sdhc and nesDS.
my girlfriend has the same setup.

on my ds nesDS worked perfect but on my girlfriend it didn't.
it was not showing any files or directories at all.

i started thinking why?!
maybe i formatted my card with the panasonic sd formatting tool, and my girlfriends card in windows. i needed to test this theory.

so i backedup her card. did the panasonic sd format (standard settings).
placed all files back on and BBAAMMMM.
NESDS works right of the shelf.
no patching, no nds file converting no nothing....
just like it always worked when we still had a 2 gb non HC card

btw we got 990 roms in the same folder

so, i just wanted to let you guys know this.

enjoy,
Pman

 

[Dragonpike]

Same thing here, when i was using my 2 GB Sandisc, loaded no problem. But on my 4 Gig Class 4 Kingston, won't work unless I DLDI it and turn on the patching. Now I can get it to run....but I can't switch roms. Is it the SRAM thing?

 

[Searinox]

It is. You gotta first load a ROM that doesn't save in any manner, like Super Mario Bros. 1, then you can load any other ROM but the first has got to be regular(no SRAM). The problem occurs on >2GB memories in conjunction with the Supercard firmware. The Panasonic formater doesn't, didn't, and will never do anything different than the Windows formatter.