Hardware Help my alpha sapphire cart has water damage (pic included)

Melsbacksfriend

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I made some attempts to reconnect board traces to no avail. I found a 3d print file for a replacement shell and I want to know if anyone's designed a replacement PCB that I can order on some service like PCBway. I'd prefer one that I can just transfer the ROM chip onto and I'll be good to go. Yes, I have a soldering station with both a heat gun and iron, flux, solder and a digital microscope and have the necessary skills. I've soldered BGA153 chips during Nintendo Switch repairs before, which are even more difficult to solder. I'd prefer a cloned PCB so I don't have to destroy another cartridge to fix this one. If there isn't an open source cloned PCB, how would I design one? I'd prefer a tutorial that uses KiCad as that is the best in terms of FOSS I've heard.
 

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Melsbacksfriend

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Looks like the cartridge pins are fucked. Also, what is that green stuff on the front of the cart, parts of the PCB?

I recommend swapping the PCB from another game. If I recall correctly, the NAND chip is the only one on the board.
Yea maybe just use the board from some dumb shovelware game I have
 
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Jayro

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Zooming in on those pins, it looks like somebody has covered each pin with solder before the water damage even occured. This cartridge is sadly a lost cause, unless you can fund a donor 3DS cart to transfer that ROM chip to.
 

Melsbacksfriend

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3DS games save to the system, not the cartridge. At least for Pokemon that I'm aware.
Save data is on the cartridge, extdata is on the console. I think you're thinking of the Switch
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Zooming in on those pins, it looks like somebody has covered each pin with solder before the water damage even occured. This cartridge is sadly a lost cause, unless you can fund a donor 3DS cart to transfer that ROM chip to.
Just to clarify, that was my attempts to reconnect board traces. I found a dumb shovelware game that my sister played like once that I can use.
 

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Jayro

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Save data is on the cartridge, extdata is on the console. I think you're thinking of the Switch
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Just to clarify, that was my attempts to reconnect board traces. I found a dumb shovelware game that my sister played like once that I can use.
Good luck and godspeed, soldier! 💪 🪖
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3ds games are saved to the cartridge except for a few games like fantasy save data are stored on the sd card, pokemon game save data are on cartridge.

There's no save chip on that PCB.
 

gaberilde

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Good luck and godspeed, soldier! 💪 🪖
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There's no save chip on that PCB.
Yep they save to to the card, i know from inserting other peoples games into my system and getting their save data lol 3ds was the last system to do this after that they all save built in to system now with switch
 

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