Hacking Small issue..

[MikeALC]

I bought 2 acekard 2is about a year back and everything plays well except for the fact that BOTH acekards eventually start to lock the games up. It is not a contact issue because I have done many tests to make sure of this.

Only some games (bigger games like pokemon, and animal crossing) start to freeze up at random parts of the game and eventually just completely lock me out before I even get to the title screen.

Both cards are authentic (tried both codes on back on the website) and have been updated to the latest firmware. (1.9.0)

I am playing these cards on a DSL and have used both a PNY 4GB mini SD and a 4GB Sandisk mini SD. I have used the best SD Formatting tool and even tried just changing out my firmware but to no avail.

Here is where things get strange. I originally tried swapping the broken games with another version (same one on card but new and not played) and it fixed it for awhile but the lock ups occur again after some play. I assumed something like anti-piracy BUT this also works if I drag the game off of the card, delete the broken game from the card and replace it with the one I just dragged off and WALA, it works again. Same broken game..just deleted and pretty much refreshed.

Since this happens with 2 different cards and two different mini SD cards, I know this has nothing to do with the cards directly, but what in the heck causes these lock ups at around the 8 or 9th play!? Figuring this out is driving me insane.

Also, I have tried disabling cheats and even disabling anti-piracy but still get the lock ups. I also bought these cards from RealHotStuff last year along with a working original R4.

Any ideas of what is going on???

Thank you.

-Mike

 

[Another World]

pretty much EVERY acekard 2i without the acetel chip sticking out the back has contact issues. what you are describing is either a contact issue, a bad rom, or a crappy msd card. i have 2i cards that work great then all of a sudden they freeze up or whatever, from a contact issue. i can game for days, weeks, even months, then it happens. reseating usually fixes the problem.

the acekard uses micro sd cards, not mini. just wanted to say that so further discussions don't get confusing and off-track. PNY isn't a great brand at all, especially for flash kits. sandisk is ok but from a few tests i saw the read speeds can be rather slow. adata and transcend micro sd cards are recommended for flash kit use.

for those larger roms (128MB+) format your msd card with 16k clusters. turn off ap patching for any games fixed with loader updates.

make sure you verify your roms by crc value against a known goodset listing, just to make sure they aren't pre-patched or corrupted.

if its not a contact issue, its not a corrupted rom/akaio install, then it has to be the micro sd card. try picking up an 8 gb class 6 transcend. they are under $10 on newegg.com.

-another world

 

[MikeALC]

So I found a solution (kind of) and I was wrong about it not being the micro SD. It appears that if I use a 2gb sandisk micro sd (non sdhc), the big games (Pokemon Black 2, Animal Crossing Wild World, exc) all work perfect (except for some lag do to the slower micro sd) and NEVER have freeze ups like they do with both the sandisk and PNY 4GB SDHC micro sd cards.

It appears as if after a few plays, the game data becomes corrupted (not .sav, but the actual .nds file) and needs to be replaced. This is sort of strange and when I check the properties of the file on my sd card and the one on my computer (testing Animal Crossing), I can see that in the Properties/Details/Attributes, it is now an "N" where the original was an "A".

Not sure if that really has anything to do with the freezing, but it does seem to change after a bit of play. Any ideas on why this only seems to be happening with micro SD cards that are over 2GBs (SDHC)?? Thank you.

-Mike

 

[Another World]

double check the CRC values to make sure the files aren't corrupted to begin with. your copy of akaio is 1.9.0 and you are using the latest loaders? did you format your msd card using the panasonic formatter?

it is entirely possible that the problem is hardware related. perhaps a solder point for the msd card slot. i would debug everything possible before i considered it hardware.

are you only having issues with 128MB+ ROM files? is homebrew with saves (emulation perhaps) working without issue? are smaller games working?

-another world