THE TALE OF SADNESS:
Back in 2019, I bought an El CheapoSD from BennVenn. It never worked quite right when I got it, and the shipping back to Australia to have it repaired just wasn't going to be worth it. The navigation was clunky, unresponsive, and I wasn't able to flash anything to the NORflash to overwrite Shantae, the ROM he pre-flashes to test before shipping out. Well I somehow ended up soft-bricking my cart, and it would forever boot with a blacked-out Nintendo logo as if there was no cartridge inserted at all.
View attachment 259397
THE TALE OF SUCCESS:
I was thinking of my soft-bricked cart today, when I had a brilliant idea! I have a GBxCart flasher now... And it gave me hope that I could use it to potentially reflash the firmware and recover my investment. So I plugged the green cartridge into my GBxCart flasher (v1.3c with R29 firmware), and took a look at the cartridge information in FlashGBX. All of it was a garbled mess... Closed out of FlashGBX, and I renamed ECSD2009.BEN (the carts firmware) to ECSD2009.GB, and set the GBxCart Writer (GUI version) v1.45 to "Generic 3.3v Flash Cart (Auto detect)" and it flashed the firmware update right over with no issues! I booted up the cart, and was finally able to upgrade to the ECSD2022.BEN firmware from the SD card, totally fixing it!
And the UI was no longer sluggish and unresponsive! I think it must have just had a bad firmware flash right out of the gate.
View attachment 259398
IN CONCLUSION:
This wraps up my short success story, and I hope it helps anyone who might have a soft-bricked El CheapoSD! I honestly did NOT think it would be a working solution, but I'm actually glad that it worked!
Back in 2019, I bought an El CheapoSD from BennVenn. It never worked quite right when I got it, and the shipping back to Australia to have it repaired just wasn't going to be worth it. The navigation was clunky, unresponsive, and I wasn't able to flash anything to the NORflash to overwrite Shantae, the ROM he pre-flashes to test before shipping out. Well I somehow ended up soft-bricking my cart, and it would forever boot with a blacked-out Nintendo logo as if there was no cartridge inserted at all.
View attachment 259397
THE TALE OF SUCCESS:
I was thinking of my soft-bricked cart today, when I had a brilliant idea! I have a GBxCart flasher now... And it gave me hope that I could use it to potentially reflash the firmware and recover my investment. So I plugged the green cartridge into my GBxCart flasher (v1.3c with R29 firmware), and took a look at the cartridge information in FlashGBX. All of it was a garbled mess... Closed out of FlashGBX, and I renamed ECSD2009.BEN (the carts firmware) to ECSD2009.GB, and set the GBxCart Writer (GUI version) v1.45 to "Generic 3.3v Flash Cart (Auto detect)" and it flashed the firmware update right over with no issues! I booted up the cart, and was finally able to upgrade to the ECSD2022.BEN firmware from the SD card, totally fixing it!
And the UI was no longer sluggish and unresponsive! I think it must have just had a bad firmware flash right out of the gate.View attachment 259398
IN CONCLUSION:
This wraps up my short success story, and I hope it helps anyone who might have a soft-bricked El CheapoSD! I honestly did NOT think it would be a working solution, but I'm actually glad that it worked!
