Hacking Acekards random freezing

[yusuo]

I've been selling alot of acekard recently (and before anyone gets shirty I've been selling them to friends at cost, not been charging anything extra)
Anyway I've been selling alot of acekards recently, the only problem is i've been getting alot of complaints about games freezing, I have the latest akaio, with the latest loader and flashed all the cards so there compatible with the newest 3ds firmware, basically in the hope of future proofing them.

Now as I said the games are freezing alot, for what i'm being told no reason, at first I thought it might be anti-piracy protection built into acekard as I've experienced a few problems with it before, but after playing around with that for a bit kinda determined thats not the problem (its off by default now), then I thought it might be a contact issue, so done the paper trick and still the problem continues.

Now its not doing it with a specific game but a random variety of games, one minute i got someone saying about GTA:CW freezing, next its Disney Princess's that not working. There really isn't a specific game this is failing on, from what I can tell all the cards are legit HWID=81, the picture looks slightly different than on the Acekard website but I just took that with a pinch of salt.

These cards are going mostly to under 10's so I can understand a bit of rough and tumble but then again my one I've never had any issues with so I really am at a loss of what to do now, does anyone have any ideas on what the problem may be

I do understand that some games have issues but while one game freezes on one card it'll play perfectly fine on another and thats where I'm confused

 

[defunct32]

Wow, I really hate it when this kind of things happen and you have no clue what causes it, sorry I couldn't help much but hopefully someone knowledgeable will drop by!

 

[EyeZ]

You haven't mentioned what make or class (if any) of microSD's, i always tend to buy the class rated microSD's (class 6)

 

[frogboy]

Try re-formatting the microSD cards with the Panasonic SD Formatter tool:
http://filetrip.net/f25981-Panasonic-SD-Formatter-3-0.html

 

[yusuo]

You haven't mentioned what make or class (if any) of microSD's, i always tend to buy the class rated microSD's (class 6)

Sorry there all Class 4 4GB Sandisk Card, I use the same ones on my Acekard and on my DSTwo

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[frogboy]

Now as I said the games are freezing alot, for what i'm being told no reason, at first I thought it might be anti-piracy protection built into acekard as I've experienced a few problems with it before, but after playing around with that for a bit kinda determined thats not the problem (its off by default now)

Does this mean that the ANTI-Anti-Piracy setting is turned off in the Acekard menu?

 

[EyeZ]

I have advised others before to use Transcend class 6 when they have had freezing probs and it has solved their problem, i'm not saying it would solve your problem but there again it may.

 

[yusuo]

Ill keep that in mind for the future but still doesnt solve my problems now

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[frogboy]

Have all these cards been Anti-counterfeit checked?

 

[yusuo]

The HWID matches official cards I don't really want to be opening the shells of the cards to see it naked

 

[Another World]

i received 10 hwid 81 acekards with the anti-counterfeit code and 2 of the new acekards for beta testing a few months ago. all of them have contact issues on any xl i've tried them in, but not on the lite. they fail to boot up, and when they do work they lose contact when playing which causes the games/homebrew to freeze/hang.

the first thing you need to do is check the anti-counterfeit code. the code is under the sticker on the back of the shell. verify that they have real acekards, meaning that the code has been checked for the first time by you or that it has been checked once before by the reseller who shipped out the card. if it has been checked more than once then it is a fake. if your cards do not have the code then they are older hwid 81 cards, and we already know that some of those were faked. you would need to open it at that point to verify that it was real. check HERE for more information.

if they are real then you probably need to fix them for the widely known contact issue.

more about that here: http://wiki.gbatemp.net/wiki/Solving_Acekard_2i_Contact_Issues

there are a few ways to fix it so try them all. the one that works best for me was to open the shell, place a thin slice of magazine paper behind the PCB, and then to glue the shell shut again. it seems drastic but it worked the best of all the options.

another issue which could be causing your problem are bad micro sd cards. i did some testing with a pretty famous homebrew dev, and we found out that the 4gb class-* sandisk msd cards have a piss poor read speed. on the 4gb we received numbers well below what other cards were performing at. this could easily be the cause of your problem.

you should also make sure the msd cards are seated correctly. there have been reports of bad msd slots that caused the msd card not to make full contact. perhaps a good test would be to play some homebrew, which would not freeze due to AP or other patching issues that would affect roms. try something like anguna or another full game, play it on and off again for a few hours and see what happens.

to really be sure you are going to need another msd card. it is good to keep a few on hand just for debugging. i would also recommend the transcend msd cards over any other brand. i keep a wide selection on hand for debugging and beta testing and i've found that the class-6 transcend cards are simply the best, have never caused a problem, etc. just make sure you set up your msd card correctly but using the panasonic formatter. generic operating system formatting tools may not correctly format a msd card. the panasonic formatter has been designed just for formatting msd cards and this is why we always recommend it.

finally, are the roms from the same source? if the roms are from the same source (like torrents) they could be corrupted or missing data. i've seen it happen before. some torrent clients cause corruption by the way they cache, it was a widely known issue in utorrent for awhile and many full rom set collectors discussed it on some pretty popular torrent trackers. you could be grabbing the roms from a source that grab them all from the same place that had corrupted files. so, be 100% sure you are running clean roms and verify them by CRC against a known good set listing.

good luck,
-another world

 

[yusuo]

Thanks Another World i'll give it ago

 

[Smiths]

On my XL i always had to put duct tape on the back of the acekard to keep it from freezing.

thing lost contact all the time on the DSXL and DSi.

 

[yusuo]

Thanks smiths, and keep up the good work