Hacking Black Screen in M3 adapter Slot-2

[Karmansephmanga]

Hi everyone, recently I acquired a GBA with a flashcart M3 Slot-2, After passing the GAMEBOY logo, the screen goes black and does not advance.



If I remove the cartridge a little, the following message that the SD card needs to be formatted appears



The flashcart seems to work because if I enter it without an SD card, the message that it does not have one appears.



I already tried it on an NDS Lite and the result is the same, it worked correctly until recently, I need to know what the problem might be. Thank you!

 

[FAST6191]

What size SD card? What filesystem is it formatted to?

At this point the M3 is probably pretty old so while you are at it you might want to clean the pins, including in the SD card slot (electrical, not automotive, contact cleaner is good stuff but anything that will evaporate and not leave anything behind or corrode it will do. Get some in there and insert and remove SD card a bunch of times).

 

[Karmansephmanga]

What size SD card? What filesystem is it formatted to?

At this point the M3 is probably pretty old so while you are at it you might want to clean the pins, including in the SD card slot (electrical, not automotive, contact cleaner is good stuff but anything that will evaporate and not leave anything behind or corrode it will do. Get some in there and insert and remove SD card a bunch of times).

hi there, I tried two microSD cards including the one that came by default, the default one is 2GB in FAT format (reformatted to Fat32) and one 512MB in fat 32

 

[FAST6191]

Assuming they appeared fine on the PC it should have been OK there -- I was mainly wanting to make sure they were not SDHC. I don't know which filesystem the M3 kernels preferred in the end but if both were covered here

Time to clean the pins then.

 

[WigWrm]

I've had this issue in the past (the black screen at bootup). It was because the rechargeable battery inside of the cart was dead. I replaced the battery in my M3 lite and it came back to life afterwards.

 

[MockyLock]

I have the same issue in mine.
Thanks for the tip, i'll give a try asap !

 

[Karmansephmanga]

Thanks for your replies!! this helped me a lot

 

[Shadow#1]

I've had this issue in the past (the black screen at bootup). It was because the rechargeable battery inside of the cart was dead. I replaced the battery in my M3 lite and it came back to life afterwards.

did u replace it with another tabbed rechargeable or just a regular non-rechargeable and of so pics please?

 

[MarKSlasH]

I replaced it once some years ago with common Alkaline button battery, same model number, it is not rechargeable. It was a pain to solder, I can't tell if it is still working.

As for OP problem, if the SD card is formatted with newer OS, like windows 10, it will not boot with a black screen. I found a post here on GBA Temp telling to format with older OS default formatter (Windows XP) and it worked.