Hacking R4 SDHC kernel problem.

[alalalt]

First of all, hi to you all, I just registered but I've been lurking for a while.

A couple of days ago, I purchased a R4 SDHC card. The card had a french version of an old firmware, so I needed to upgrade it. Here's what I did:

* formatted the card with panasonic sd formatter. I did a full format and the card is now regular FAT16.
* tried the latest firmware (1.26) from the site (www.r4sdhc.com). Using this, the card would hang on the infamous "Loading" screen
* tried firmware v. 1.25 from the same site. Same as above, I got stuck on the "Loading" screen
* tried firmware v. 1.22. This one works as a charm.
* tried firmware v. 1.23. The card booted, the games ran ok, but everytime I tried to use soft-reset, I would get a screen telling me "This card is a fake!!"
* tried firmware v. 1.24. Same as above, the card booted, the games ran, but soft-reset was still giving me the message.

tl;dr - The only kernel that fully works is 1.22. Anything newer is either stuck at loading, or tells me "This card is fake" upon soft-reset.

The card looks exactly like the one below:

Another problem I have with the card is that the cheat file from gbatemp (CHEAT.DAT) does not work (cheats do not show up in the bottom screen), yet the one that comes packed with the firmware works.

Please help, I would be forever grateful

 

[ShadowEO]

I've got the same card, and those firmwares all worked without problem for me, you might want to use YSMenu and DSision2 (DSision2 as it seems that the cards do not like loading games directly from YSMenu if it's booted as F/w, The only thing you'll be missing is soft reset unless yours turns out to be a DSTT clone), which it seems that there are many variations of the same cartridge using the same logo and everything. Mine is capable of running the Genuine firmwares and using Soft Reset while it seems yours cannot. hmmm... Try some of the R4li stuff maybe if you don't want YSMenu?

 

[alalalt]

Thank you very much for your response, ShadowEO. My first thought was trying out YSMENU, but the tutorial for it says it does not work on an R4 SDHC. I'll look a bit more into it.

 

[outgum]

* formatted the card with panasonic sd formatter. I did a full format and the card is now regular FAT16

Dont you need to have to formatted to FAT32?

 

[alalalt]

I remember reading somewhere that FAT16 is optimal for 2gb microsd cards that are to be used with the R4.

 

[alalalt]

After some time trying different firmwares, I managed to get it working. What I did was download the latest R4i kernel from the same site (www.r4sdhc.com). Aparently it is compatible with the standard R4 SDHC. Now, everything works perfectly.