Hey guys, I know that there is a thread about the Gateway 3ds reliability but i fear that my message might get lost in it. I decided to write this new thread in the hopes that my 4 days of non stop testing will help someone in a similar situation.
To make a long story short, I receive my Gateway back on Sunday when the firmware for the Gateway was still on 1.1. As such there were no diagnostic tools available for me to find out what was causing my card to always give me the "game card was removed" message. After hours of searching online I figured that my card was defective but I still wanted to find out what exactly was defective about it. As such, i began to investigate closely the contact areas of the Gateway (the contacts that connect to my 3ds and the contacts that connect the micro sd card to the gateway). While I found that the contacts on the gateway card were fine, it was the micro sd card that turned out problematic. I thus began to fiddle with the way the micros sd card fit into my gateway card. I found that if I pushed my micro sd card outward, it forced the connectors to move inward. I also found out that for the first time, my roms started to load without a hitch. However, as you can imagine this was not an exact science. It required that I keep trying until the rom loaded which was only maybe 1 out of every 5 tries. I had to constantly repeat the nintendo ds profile exploit each and everytime!
Once the diagnostic tools were released with firmware 1.2 I found out that the problem was indeed the connectors. If I entered the micro sd card without much care the light always remained stuck on yellow. However, if I fiddled around with it the test went through sucessfully. Sure enough, everytime I now want to load a game I always use the diagnostic tool first and make sure that I got it just right. I discovered that you could actually repeat the diagnostic test without actually exiting the tool itself. You simply need to press the L button again. As such, if I failed the diagnostic tool I took out my gateway fromt he slot played around with the micro sd card and put it back in. I then pressed L again. Once successfully completed I pressed R and that exited out of the diagnostic tool. I then could load my rom immediately. Everything worked!!!
The downside to this is that if you play your game and the micro sd card somehow gets out of place, your saves will likely be corrupted. This is true even after you press menu and x. I found this out through extensive testing. For instance I lost 4 hours of play on Castlevania, 2 hours of play on Mario Kart and 2 hours of play on nsmb2! This is a huge negative since you may lose hours of gameplay. it's a shoot in the dark really.
In short, for those of you having a "game card is removed" issue, it likely is the contact from your micro sd. It likely stems of a physical manufacturing defect. I will be sending my gateway back to the retailer since I still think that this kind of problem is unacceptable especially after paying around a $100 for it.
I hope this helps narrow down your problems.
update1: I've been reading some comments that claimed that some game saves can't load and that sometimes the diagnostic tools for the Gateway stop at yellow. This is exactly what happens to me. I am almost certain that the reason for this is the contacts as mentioned above. Sometimes, the test will go completely through but by the time you exit the diagnostic tool the micro sd would have moved every so slightly so that the contacts might be not touching or partially touching. Hence, game might give you the no game cart error or may load but will crash when attempting to access your save. If the game refuses to load your save, take out your gateway and fiddle around with your micro sd card, retest the card and try loading the game again. At times, I was able to get my saves to load after not being able to load them when I did this.
updated 2: I sent my gateway back to 3ds-flashcard.com without tracking (it would have cost me $76 with tracking and 10$ without) and I am crossing my fingures that they won't tell me it was lost in the mail. I should hear back from them in 2 weeks. I asked them to test it before sending me a new one so I don't have to go through this again. I hope they deal with me in an honest way.
.
