Hacking 3in1 freezes on GBA startup screen

[GameGeek]

My Ezflash V worked correctly until today. I had a SMA4 ROM installed in NOR and decided to overwrite it with a different one, but after doing that, upon trying to load the new installed ROM I would get the SMA4 startup screens instead, and it would freeze telling that the save is corrupt. Also, trying to load a GBA ROM from the SD would only get the same result (loading the first SMA4 screens from the NOR and telling me that the save is corrupt). I tried formatting the NOR with Hyperlisk's NOR Eraser, but nothing changed. So finally I tried writing a blank 32 MB file to the NOR to overwrite the old data. This seems to have cleared it, as my DS no longer acts like it has a GBA game in Slot 2. However, now when I try to load a game from the SD, it either freezes on the GBA startup screen (once the animation and sound finish playing, it freezes right there), or in the GBA Player screen. Note that I also get this effect when I switch to NOR mode and press X to run the game installed to NOR (which should be blank).

I'm using GBA ExpLoader 0.58b0MX. If it matters, whenever I load the app, I get the "Slot2 expansion pack not found Please redo from start" error message, but after pressin A on it, I get the following message: "may I set this Slot2 expansion pack for GBA ExpLoader?" prompt message. I don't recall if this happened before today.

Any ideas?

 

[jimmyemunoz]

Believe it or not it's a save problem. The EZ 3in1 is trying to apply the old Super Mario Advance 4 sram save file to your new rom. Solution, make a blank correctly sized save file for your new game, name it accordingly, and add it to the correct folder on your micro sd card.

 

[Deleted-236924]

Did you patch the rom properly?
You should patch it with EZ4Client so that it can use 1024Mbit SRAM as the save type.

 

[GameGeek]

I've done what both of you suggested: replaced the .sav files with blank files of the same size and filename, and edited some ROMs with EZ4Client to use 1024Mbit SRAM saves. Then what? I tried writing the ROMs to the NOR and nothing changed. Also, when I press Y to transfer their blank saves to the NOR, I get the "SRAM save data not found. Can't process to SAV file" error message.

Just to make sure that there's no confusion, I'm not just trying to write a ROM to the NOR; I'm trying to make it possible to load games from the SD card again. Ever since I tried to overwrite the SMA4 ROM, GBA ExpLoader tries to run whatever is installed on the NOR whenever I try to load a ROM. Even after I overwrote the NOR with a blank file, the problem persists. From what I've read online, it might be that there's corrupt data on the NOR that the only way to correct this is erasing all 80 blocks from the NOR, but Hyperlisk's NOR Eraser doesn't erase anything when I use it, which is why I resorted writing a blank 32 MB ROM to it. However, ExpLoader refuses to write any ROM bigger than that, so I can't erase all blocks via this method (from what I read, a 32 MB file equals only 64 blocks).

Note that I originally wrote a 4 MB blank file to the NOR to get rid of the header of the old ROM, but the original problem persisted (trying to run anything loaded SMA4's startup screens before freezing telling me that the save data is corrupt); the only way to get rid of it was using the 32 MB blank ROM, and ever since doing that, it froze on the GBA startup screen. I'm guessing this is because it still tries to load the NOR whenever I try to run a game from the SD but now that the SMA4 is no longer there (or most of it was overwritten), it doesn't even get to the corrupted save data screen. Trying to write any other ROM to the NOR produces no change whatsoever.