Bricked Pokémon Pearl Cartridge with Action Replay Code

[jtabc123456]

Sometime around 2015 I bricked my Pokémon Pearl cartridge by using an absurdly long action replay code (with a Datel action replay DS), where essentially the game would play the opening title sequence music but just show a white screen the entire time, and no button presses would advance beyond it. I figured the code had just corrupted the save data, but recently I was dumping my ROMs and out of curiosity I tried to play the dump on an emulator to find that it has the same issue there, even with no save data. So it turns out whatever I did actually overwrote game data somehow. Similarly, I checked the hash of the dump and it does not match anything I can find online (even though other games I've dumped do match).

Out of curiosity, Is there any way to restore the game card, or is it toast forever? I can just by a new copy of Pearl on ebay or something, but if it's possible to fix, I'm willing to try that first. I have a 3DS with CFW, if that is a possible avenue.

 

[scalr]

It's not possible to rewrite a ROM chip on a DS cartridge; the gold contacts physically do not have a write-enabled connection to the chip, so the bad code from the Action Replay isn't explicitly the cause for the incomplete ROM data when you dumped it. The cartridge assuredly has some kind of physical defect that's preventing it from reading and dumping directly. That defect would've been the only way the AR would be able to damage the chip onboard the cartridge. (Like an unintentional short circuit damaging the onboard chip)

The only way you'd know for sure is to try dumping the chip directly from the cartridge PCB, which is more trouble than it's worth.

 

[jtabc123456]

It's not possible to rewrite a ROM chip on a DS cartridge; the gold contacts physically do not have a write-enabled connection to the chip, so the bad code from the Action Replay isn't explicitly the cause for the incomplete ROM data when you dumped it. The cartridge assuredly has some kind of physical defect that's preventing it from reading and dumping directly. That defect would've been the only way the AR would be able to damage the chip onboard the cartridge. (Like an unintentional short circuit damaging the onboard chip)

The only way you'd know for sure is to try dumping the chip directly from the cartridge PCB, which is more trouble than it's worth.

I borrowed a friend's copy and dumped it and compared it to mine. The sha1-hash of my friend's copy's dump matched the Datomatic database. I did a vbindiff against both dumps and it turns out only three bytes in seemingly random locations are different in my version, but all the rest are identical. So whatever happened, most of the game's data is intact.

I was also still able to rip the save data and play the save data in an emulator without any issue.

I do remember very clearly the cartridge working before using the action replay and not working immediately afterward. Is it possible the action repay device itself could have damaged the cartridge? Are there any known instances of this happening?

 

[TheStonedModder]

I borrowed a friend's copy and dumped it and compared it to mine. The sha1-hash of my friend's copy's dump matched the Datomatic database. I did a vbindiff against both dumps and it turns out only three bytes in seemingly random locations are different in my version, but all the rest are identical. So whatever happened, most of the game's data is intact.

I was also still able to rip the save data and play the save data in an emulator without any issue.

I do remember very clearly the cartridge working before using the action replay and not working immediately afterward. Is it possible the action repay device itself could have damaged the cartridge? Are there any known instances of this happening?

The game is old as shit now

It likely just died of old age

It’s already happening to 3ds games as well

 

[scalr]

The save data still being dumpable is not unusual because there are cartridge pins dedicated to interfacing with the save chip.

I can't say for certain that an Action Replay *would* cause damage, but if the AR were manufactured in such a way that it bridged two pins unexpectedly, or provided too much power, it could've physically damaged the onboard ROM chip to prevent it from working correctly again. That wouldn't be an AR problem, but just bad luck with the manufacturing of it.

Regarding the pins, are you confident that the pins in the cartridge are as reasonably clean as possible, and the slot-1 port are similar?

 

[morelikejonarbuckle0]

Have you tried deleting the save data and seeing if it'll boot or not?

 

[jtabc123456]

Have you tried deleting the save data and seeing if it'll boot or not?

The game freezes before I can get to the screen where you can erase save data. Given it freezes in the exact same spot on an emulator without any save data, I assume this isn't a contributing factor. One of the three messed up bytes that's wrong is critical to getting to the title screen.