I loaded Pocket NES on NOR Flash, and after a while, I start realizing that games have garbled sprites. Why is this happening?
do normal games work fine?
Test the copy of Pocket NES you have on your SD card on VBA-M or some other GBA emulator and see what happens. Make sure it's not some issue with the software first. You could try reformatting the NOR afterwards, if it's not the software.
I cannot for the life of me recreate the problem in an emulator.
I even had a problem where scrolling through the NES games list would crash PocketNES altogether. This would happen on my M3 as well, and I even have confirmation that it's happening to someone else.
Maybe it's PocketNES's fault, but I don't know. Maybe it's writing to the NOR memory somehow?
I could just shrink the ROM down to 16MB and compile multiple PocketNES ROMs to load into the 16MB flash.
It's just so frustrating. I just got this and it already has a severe problem.
Are there multiple versions of Pocket NES? Try older ones to see if this happens with those, too.
There have been some issues with various pieces of homebrew and soft reset in the past. Pocketnes had some issues with saving but that should also have been sorted.
Anyway if I had to guess then I would suspect the ?SD card (or something along the chain there) -- a few minutes of NOR writing is more likely to see errors arise than 30 seconds of PSRAM writing. Maybe not quite this behaviour (though it is well within feasibility) but something like it.
Ok, I can not replicate this issue. I tried scrolling through the list of games a few times, I never got the sprites to garble up, only pocketnes freezing entirely. But this is not persistent powering of the gba or nds and running the rom from NOR again fixes the system. I tried on my ezflash IV microsdhc and the ezflash V 3in1 NOR with the same results.
EDIT: what firmware version are you using? Are you using the latest 1.76 kernel?