Hacking Supercard SD crashes with 1.7?

[monkey]

When I upgraded by Supercard SD (regular SD, not lite, etc. -- the original purple one) to the 1.7 firmware everything started crashing. Games randomly just lock up, usually the music keeps playing but everything else freezes. Sometimes I can't even get that far, I get an error saying that the SC can't find the SD card, "Please turn off GBA". Occasionally I can't actually get it to load at all and I have to give up. Sometimes it would go 20 minutes before freezing, sometimes it would freeze immediately, like while the logos in the game are displaying at the beginning. Didn't seem to matter which game either -- Children of Mana seemed worse than others, maybe, but NSMB, Metroid Hunters, and Mario v. DK 2 all crashed too.Tried re-patching with and without DMA for all ROMs, with and without Trim, etc., nothing worked.

Tried formatting the SD card, no help. I only have one SD card so I can't try a different one.

So I just downgraded to the 1.63 firmware and 2.56 SC software and re-patched all of the ROMs I had on the card, and everything seems fine. Anybody else run into this?

I tried searching for similar posts but couldn't get the search engine to return anything (I mean ANYTHING -- "Supercard freeze", "Supercard crash", etc. all return no results at all).

 

[5uck3rpunch]

I have the same cart & I'm using the same firmware with no issues (other than the obvious: No Tony Hawk & the reverse alphabetical ROM order). MAYBE it's a conflict with the brand of SD card? Try another one if possible.

You may also want to copy the contents of the card off to the PC to hold & then convert a ROM (one that just gave you crashing issues) with the new firmware to see if it gives you issues like it did with the copied one holding on the PC.

 

[monkey]

Never mind, after an hour or so Children of Mana froze with the old firmware, then everything went to hell and now it's back to freezing after just a couple of minutes. Damn, either the SC itself or my SD card has something wrong. Good excuse to get a new one maybe?

Anyone else ever have random freezes with a SuperCard on any firmware? It's been working just fine since I got it (the day the Lite came out) and all of the sudden it's freezing constantly. Must be just a coincidence that it started exactly when I put the updated firmware in.

 

[faceless]

try a different sd card if you can...

 

[cory1492]

Sounds like you may want to try and clean the contacts (SD and SC).

 

[monkey]

what a pain. tried cleaning the card (alcohol and a cotton swap which worked on my old F2A and EZFlash2 when they got dirty). I can't see a way to clean the SC without taking it apart, might resort to that soon. A coworker's bringing in an SD card to test tomorrow.

Hope it's that because I can get a new SD card easily. My bus ride to and from work is an hour each way and without my DS it's PAINFUL. Might have to resort to buying a game since shipping on a replacement SC (or M3 or whatever) is going to take like 2 weeks unless I'm willing to pay more for the shipping than I am for the card...

 

[thegame07]

unlucky m8 lets us know if you get it working

 

[monkey]

Eh, no luck. Tried it with two other SD cards, all with the same result. It's really flaky, last night I got an hour straight with it with no crashes. It seems to depend on the game, Children of Mana and Yoshi's Island crash a lot, Mario vs. DK 2 and NSMB crash sometimes, and Tetris doesn't crash at all.

But at any rate I thought it was a good excuse to get one that doesn't stick out and color-matches my DS, so I ordered a SC lite rumble. Hopefully the 12-18 day delivery estimate is overly pessimistic, not sure I can really take only playing Tetris for 2 weeks!

Thanks for the responses.

 

[cheeo]

Good luck with your new card, but one more thing to try is open the SC & adjust the pins that touch the SD card making sure there making good contact. This is more a problem with the M3 but the symptoms sound the same, so it’s worth a try before giving up.