Hacking Fake or not? with high res pic of PCB + official 1.17 firmware works

[coursemyhorse]

Hi guys. Great info resource here. I am happy to use the firmware that has been hacked to prevent issues but the official one seems to work. Today I recieved 3 DSTTs from Deal Extreme and I am not sure if they are fake. I checked the DSTT site and it does not strictly match the fake picture although is close to it. It does not have the fake gold dot or number 2 on it either so what do you think?

I loaded the OFFICIAL firmware 1.17 and loaded a game up fine. I have not thoroughly tested yet, but then, I do not know what else to try to see if it breaks? Can I assume it will be ok or is it still possible it could go wrong further down the line?

I also used the fake checker utility and it came back with:

DSTT Flash Checker 0.01

unknown device : FF00BA4A
Good!! (^^)v

 

[Bri]

Fake. All known fakes have flat microSD holders, whereas real ones are curved.

DsttFlashChecker returns a false positive if it can't identify the chip (if it doesn't know, it assumes it's real even though it might not be).

If you ran the official firmware on it, you might have destroyed it or it might get destroyed sometime down the road (it doesn't destroy the flash cart every time). If you destroy it, you can run DsttFlashWriter to restore it.

Either way, you may want to return it to DealExtreme and get a real one.

-Bri

 

[rasputin]

Yeh it's not an official ndstt.com one, but I expect it's fine with any dstt firmware if it's from a new batch because all the cloners had to do to protect them is disable writing to the flash by removing a trace or solder joint or whatever.

I have some cndstt.com ones atm that seem fine with original 1.17 firmware too.. still testing though


edit, I'm not reccomending anyone to use non-safe firmware on clones, just thought I'd mention that, use the safe version available here for peace of mind.

 

[coursemyhorse]

Cheers guys. Ok I loaded some games on and my kids have been playing them but some of them fail to load up and I get a black screne during load, or....they load up but when I select the English Flag to enter the game in english mode, it also then just locks up or hangs. This happens in so far about 3 different games. But others are fine.
Does this sound like the kind of behaviour you would experience as a result of the card killer software included in the official firmware intermittantly borking the card? Or is it more likely to be that the DSTT is functioning poorly out of th ebox purely because it is fake? Or...is it somethign else I have done wrong like got some corrupt ROM files or something? The latter seems unlikely...is there a way to run a verify tool on my roms to check they are not corrupt?

Thanks a lot for your help.

 

[Bri]

If it's always the same games, it's probably not your flash cart being "killed" by the fake-killer code. The "killed" flash carts do experience intermittent crashes, but usually when they crash they don't even go to the menu, and it isn't limited to specific games.

So, which games are you having trouble with? Did you try changing some of the settings like DMA or turning off soft reset or cheats to see if that helps?

You can use Rominator to check your ROM files (it does a CRC checksum) to make sure they're not corrupt. It also has lots of other useful features (it'll trim your ROM, put it on your microSD card, etc). There are other smaller programs that will similarly validate the ROM if Rominator is overkill for you.

-Bri

 

[coursemyhorse]

If it's always the same games, it's probably not your flash cart being "killed" by the fake-killer code. The "killed" flash carts do experience intermittent crashes, but usually when they crash they don't even go to the menu, and it isn't limited to specific games.

So, which games are you having trouble with? Did you try changing some of the settings like DMA or turning off soft reset or cheats to see if that helps?

You can use Rominator to check your ROM files (it does a CRC checksum) to make sure they're not corrupt. It also has lots of other useful features (it'll trim your ROM, put it on your microSD card, etc). There are other smaller programs that will similarly validate the ROM if Rominator is overkill for you.

-Bri

Bri thanks for your reply. I think to be safe, I will probably end up putting the firmware on that is the SAFE i.e hacked 1.17 and see if that improves the problematic games. As you say, it will probably just be the same so I will check out that rom checker and the things you mention to see if that helps. Where can I get the rominator and how do I check this DMA setting?
Finally, should I be formatting as FAT or FAT32 for the Micro SD card? As I selected FAT32 when I did it.

Regards

 

[Bri]

Yes, I would recommend always using the hacked 1.17 regardless, just to be safe.

Use the Panasonic formatter to format your microSD card. Not only does Windows not support proper formatting according to the SD specifications, the Panasonic formatter will automatically select the best format for your card (in general, FAT for microSD cards, FAT32 for microSDHC cards).

See this Rominator thread for more info (bottom of first post for download links): http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=87675

The DMA settings are in the options menu, which you get to by hilighting the game and clicking the

icon. Make sure you turn off DMA, cheats, soft reset, and any other options that might be interfering with the game. Then if it works, turn them back on again one at a time until you figure out which is causing the problem.

There are some games that simply don't work with the DSTT, so it's possible that you've encountered a few of those. Other (newer) games have copy protection and might require certain cheats to be enabled for them to work with the DSTT.

-Bri

 

[coursemyhorse]

Yes, I would recommend always using the hacked 1.17 regardless, just to be safe.

Use the Panasonic formatter to format your microSD card. Not only does Windows not support proper formatting according to the SD specifications, the Panasonic formatter will automatically select the best format for your card (in general, FAT for microSD cards, FAT32 for microSDHC cards).

See this Rominator thread for more info (bottom of first post for download links): http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=87675

The DMA settings are in the options menu, which you get to by hilighting the game and clicking the

icon. Make sure you turn off DMA, cheats, soft reset, and any other options that might be interfering with the game. Then if it works, turn them back on again one at a time until you figure out which is causing the problem.

There are some games that simply don't work with the DSTT, so it's possible that you've encountered a few of those. Other (newer) games have copy protection and might require certain cheats to be enabled for them to work with the DSTT.

-Bri

Thanks again Bri.
Now you mention it I do recall reading something about making sure to format micro SDHC cards properly. I will have a look at that panasonic formatter. Got a link? Otherwise I will search and I'm sure I will find it. Ok, I will check out what stuff I had enabled/turned on which might have been interferring with things. I just ran the rominator verify tool on 300 of my games and it just came back with "verification complete" which I assume means they all passed. I also just ran it on the exact list of the 40 straight from the DSTT where some of them were hanging, and they also came back as "verification complete".

I know the one game that would never load was: "0056 Super Mario 64 DS (v01)(U)(Trashman)"

Additionally one of the Ratatouille games either 1977 or 2008 was hanging during load when you select english flag to start game.

The other one I think was one of the spongebob squarepants games.

You can tell I have loaded up games biast to young children

I appreciate the help given to such a noob to DSTT as you must get asked this kind of stuff all the time. Thanks a bunch

 

[Bri]

http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/d..._formatter.html

-Bri

 

[coursemyhorse]

Cheers
Update, DS has been played a fair bit over the last few days and we are still seeing occasional lock ups / freezes / hangs during load of a game, or worse still when you are in the middle of a game. Not very happy about that as an intermittantly working cart is the worst kind of problem to deal with. I can only assume the fakes I got shipped are of poor quality and hence causing such issues.

Shame

 

[Bri]

There are three possible causes of intermittent crashes that I can think of.

One is that you have a hardware problem (the DSTT isn't making proper contact with the DS). You can try placing a folded-up piece of paper into the slot beside the DSTT opposite the contacts to help push them towards the contacts inside the DS. Oddly, contact issues seem to occur more often with real DSTT's than with fakes, which is the only reason I suspect that it might be something else. But you can try the paper trick and see if that helps.

The second cause is that your microSD card is getting corrupt. This can happen for a number of reasons including a bad microSD card, a bad microSD reader, not using "safely remove hardware" every time, not leaving some free space on your microSD card for system and save files, not using the Panasonic formatter to format your card, and not putting your games in a "games" folder (there is a limit to the number of files that can be on the root of your microSD card).

The other possible cause is, of course, the fake-killer firmware. Given that you've run the fake-killer firmware on it, you may very well have "killed" it. You could try the following to see if it fixes your problems (following these instructions carefully will also fix most of the problems related to your microSD card getting corrupted):

Try these steps:[*]Use the Panasonic formatter to reformat your microSD card: http://panasonic.jp/support/global/cs/sd/d..._formatter.html[*]Grab the official 1.17 menu from here (but do NOT install TTMENU.DAT from it as it contains the fake-killer code!!!): http://gbatemp.net/index.php?download=4476[*]Copy the TTMENU folder (but not TTMENU.DAT) from the official firmware to your microSD card.[*]Grab this archive: http://gbatemp.net/index.php?download=4086[*]Copy all four files from the archive to your microSD card.[*]Make a folder named "games" on your microSD card. Copy 2 or 3 games (.nds files) to the new "games" folder.[*]Run "safely remove hardware", select your microSD reader in the list, and press STOP before removing your microSD card from your PC.[*]Insert your DSTT into the NDS. Insert your microSD card into the DSTT. Turn on the NDS.[*]Run the DsttFlashChecker program to see if you have a real or a fake DSTT. If you have a fake DSTT and suspect that it may have been destroyed by the official fake-killer firmware, run the DsttFlashWriter program to re-flash your DSTT.[*]You should be able to run your games now. You can delete DsttFlashChecker.nds, DsttFlashWriter.nds, and DSTTDUMP.BIN from your microSD card if you want.[*]Always keep the following in mind:

• Always leave some free space on your microSD card for save files and system files.
• Always put games into your "games" folder. Also, put homebrew into a folder. Leave as few files as possible on the root of your microSD card.
• Always use "safely remove hardware" to remove your microSD card from your PC.
• Use the Panasonic formatter if you ever have to reformat.
• Make sure you don't use the official TTMENU.DAT (particularly if you have a fake) because it contains fake-killer code.

-Bri