Hacking GBA Roms not working

[Insomniac18]

Hey, so I have an M3 adapter, and I'm still pretty new at all this. I don't know what exactly the model is, since my friend gave me this as a gift. Here's a pic though if that helps.

Right, so when I first got this like a year ago I put old NDS/GBA roms on it, using the M3 wiki to patch nds roms correctly. However gba ones worked fine every time without problems, using the M3 Game Manager software. So I got a new sd recently and decided to load a bunch of gba roms and when I try to play them on the ds, the file loads to 00000kb and doesn't load past that. if I run it in ds mode, with the passkey, it loads to a black screen.

same rom, same settings, no clue. of course I could be doing something dumb.

thanks in advance, new to the forum and it looks awesome!

 

[Rayder]

That looks like an M3 Perfect miniSD.


What's the size of the SD you stuck in it? 2gigs is all it can handle properly. They say it can handle more, but it really can't.

Did you format the SD to FAT or FAT32? I found FAT32 to work better in that particular cart. DO NOT use the Panasonic Formatter for the M3 Perfect, it always did the same thing to me when I tried to use the Panasonic Formatter (and it always formatted my 2gig card to FAT, which I didn't want). Use the standard Windows format routine (right-click, format) and manually set it to FAT32. For some reason, the M3 Perfect doesn't like custom cluster sizes like the Panasonic Formatter insists on using.

The reason I say to use FAT32 when you format it is because then you can use Start OR A to load a GBA game, and when it's formatted to FAT, it makes you hit Start to run GBA games, hitting A will result in the issue you described. That little tidbit of info took me a few hours to figure out when I first got my M3 Perfect. At first, I thought the cart was defective because of that.

If you don't wish to format again, try hitting Start, see if that works to boot the games. If that does work, then it's just a matter of FAT vs. FAT32 and you should now know what to do from there.


Hope that helps you!

 

[Insomniac18]

THANK YOU SO MUCH.

Who knew it was something this simple?!

i pressed start, and wala, it works. Thanks dude!

 

[Rayder]

I have done my good deed for the day.

Welcome to GBAtemp!

 

[da1writer]

Also, take note that unless you are using sakura, Touchpod will only be able to read 128 GBA Rom files for some odd reason...
If you have 128 roms files you'll see stuff in the rom size like "64mb, 128mb, etc.", they will work just fine. Now if you load up 129 or more roms, you'll see "0kb, 6543kb, etc.", it looks really weird and becomes real iffy in loading up the rom or not...
I've had the displeasure of this happening to me, I had a 150 GBA roms and Sakura ran them fine (even with the wrong rom sizes) but Touchpod just didn't want to run to roms. So I deleted some roms and found that Touchpod ran the 128 roms fine and had the right rom sizes...