Hacking The M3 Sakura FAQ

[powered_by_tux]

I apologize. A small investigation showed that the loading screen only accepts a 8-bit bitmap with 256 colors. I saved it in the according format now:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/axu9z2

 

[mc_B3oWoLF]

Well, I've got a suggestion for you, Styles420:
Try unpacking the original beta-archive (downloaded from handheldsources or linFoxDomain) and just add/replace the files needed YOURSELF

(I just 'compiled' Sakura 1.34 myself, using the tips, written in this topic

)
If it still doesn't help much - try to get a MicroSD from any friend of yours to test if it's a faulty card.

 

[metron]

It says it doesnt cut off the last 3 secs anymore. wich it still does for me. so i re encoded them with the new DSM encoder and now its cutting off 1-2 secs. better. but still. any solution? Im using the official english release by the M3 team by the way

 

[Styles420]

I used a SD-capable phone to format it this time, and got four clean boots in a row before failure - so I think it's my card (or, with my luck, my M3).

I guess I'm going back to Touchpod for now - it wasn't perfect, but it didn't corrupt my card nearly as often as Sakura is...

Considering the problems with this beta release, I'm wondering if there isn't more to the story... from a programming perspective, there should be no reason for the select button function to be missing unless it was purposefully removed/disabled. Maybe the M3 team gave us an older version of Sakura or something... they do seem to treat our region like the red-headed step child of the family...

 

[Densetsu]

I've been having troubles running Sakura - regardless of how I format it (FAT. FAT32, various allocation sizes, Windows formatter, Panasonic formatter, etc.), I'm lucky to be able to boot it once - usually I get black screens. When it does boot without any problems, all I have to do is turn it off and back on, and it won't boot. When this happens, sometimes I just have to put it into the computer, do ABSOLUTELY nothing to it, then put it back in my M3, and it will boot just fine again - once.

I suspect that my SD card could be a part of the problem, but I'm not certain. I'm using a 2GB Lexar SD (not SDHC) made in Taiwan - probably not the highest quality.

It's also possible that one of the modifications in the custom package is causing some instability, since I can usually get two or three good boots out of the original beta release - the custom pack, as mentioned above, might not even boot the first time.

Any thoughts, suggestions?When did this start happening?

And is this happening for anyone else?

I wish I had my US flashcart with me so I could test these things before I upload them...

*EDIT*
QUOTE(powered_by_tux @ Feb 15 2009, 02:59 PM) I apologize. A small investigation showed that the loading screen only accepts a 8-bit bitmap with 256 colors. I saved it in the according format now:

http://www.sendspace.com/file/axu9z2

Perfect!

Thank you very much! Updating the file now...

 

[Skyline969]

I've been having troubles running Sakura - regardless of how I format it (FAT. FAT32, various allocation sizes, Windows formatter, Panasonic formatter, etc.), I'm lucky to be able to boot it once - usually I get black screens. When it does boot without any problems, all I have to do is turn it off and back on, and it won't boot. When this happens, sometimes I just have to put it into the computer, do ABSOLUTELY nothing to it, then put it back in my M3, and it will boot just fine again - once.

I suspect that my SD card could be a part of the problem, but I'm not certain. I'm using a 2GB Lexar SD (not SDHC) made in Taiwan - probably not the highest quality.

It's also possible that one of the modifications in the custom package is causing some instability, since I can usually get two or three good boots out of the original beta release - the custom pack, as mentioned above, might not even boot the first time.

Any thoughts, suggestions?

When did this start happening?

And is this happening for anyone else?

I wish I had my US flashcart with me so I could test these things before I upload them...

Everything's going good on my 2 GB unbranded Micro SD. I'm using the custom package of M3 Sakura.

 

[kobykaan]

I suspect that my SD card could be a part of the problem, but I'm not certain. I'm using a 2GB Lexar SD (not SDHC) made in Taiwan - probably not the highest quality.

maby time to try a new mem card they are cheap enough to replace how long have you had/used it for!?

maby its just on its way out from over usage

 

[Styles420]

I suspect that my SD card could be a part of the problem, but I'm not certain. I'm using a 2GB Lexar SD (not SDHC) made in Taiwan - probably not the highest quality.

maby time to try a new mem card they are cheap enough to replace how long have you had/used it for!?

maby its just on its way out from over usage

You could have a point there - I've gotten a lot of use out of it in the year that I've owned it, maybe it is just failing from wear and tear. They don't make things like they used to...

I guess I'll grab another card and report back as to whether I still have any problems or not - it's still (remotely) possible that there is some underlying instability in Sakura as well, and maybe the two problems are compounding each other. But if no one else is having this bad of a problem, I'm inclined to believe it's just my card now.

[EDIT] Didn't want to make another post for this, but as it turns out, it was my card. It has been replaced with a 4GB SanDisk SDHC Class 2 (they didn't have any faster cards at the local Wal Mart, lol)

It seems to be working perfectly so far, so it seems the $20 was a worthy investment - time will tell for sure though

 

[kobykaan]

You could have a point there - I've gotten a lot of use out of it in the year that I've owned it, maybe it is just failing from wear and tear. They don't make things like they used to...

I guess I'll grab another card and report back as to whether I still have any problems or not - it's still (remotely) possible that there is some underlying instability in Sakura as well, and maybe the two problems are compounding each other. But if no one else is having this bad of a problem, I'm inclined to believe it's just my card now.

believe it or not mem cards have a limited number of read and write cycles they often state figures of 1 million read write cycles from using a lot of tech forums its a crapload less than that maby only a few thousand in some cases with poor quality unbranded or OEM branded cards

 

[Styles420]

Planned obsolescence - there's more profit in selling a crappy product repeatedly than one of quality, only once.

So what is the generally accepted best brand? I've scanned through these forums at least a dozen times, and there's a lot of conflicting information and uninformed opinions out there... PM me with any advice if you prefer to keep this forum uncluttered

Made the switch back to the smaller card for now, with touchpod since it's a bit smaller than Sakura - no problems yet, with several reboots. I did test Sakura before reloading Touchpod, and had no problems there either. So I think it's safe to say that the problem is my card

 

[Skyline969]

@Styles420: In my opinion, Kingston is the best brand you can get as it's cheap and highly reliable.

 

[wilsonramal]

Have any of you ¨send the Translated copy to the E-mail:

[email protected]¨ ? (handheldsources request)

 

[Densetsu]

Have any of you ¨send the Translated copy to the E-mail:

[email protected]¨ ? (handheldsources request)

I sent all of them on one RAR file today

The Italian one needs some work though. Almost all of the text is too long and it won't fit on the DS screen.

 

[wilsonramal]

Cool!! thx, hope they see the faq and fix the bugs...

 

[Taraxanoid]

I've been having troubles running Sakura - regardless of how I format it (FAT. FAT32, various allocation sizes, Windows formatter, Panasonic formatter, etc.), I'm lucky to be able to boot it once - usually I get black screens. When it does boot without any problems, all I have to do is turn it off and back on, and it won't boot. When this happens, sometimes I just have to put it into the computer, do ABSOLUTELY nothing to it, then put it back in my M3, and it will boot just fine again - once.

I suspect that my SD card could be a part of the problem, but I'm not certain. I'm using a 2GB Lexar SD (not SDHC) made in Taiwan - probably not the highest quality.

It's also possible that one of the modifications in the custom package is causing some instability, since I can usually get two or three good boots out of the original beta release - the custom pack, as mentioned above, might not even boot the first time.

Any thoughts, suggestions?

When did this start happening?

And is this happening for anyone else?

The black screen thing seems to be happening to me as well. Sometimes it'll turn on without issue many times in a row, but occasionally I'll get the M3 logo appear down the bottom and then just.. black.

I'm using a Sandisk 2GB FAT formatted microSD.. Haven't had problems with it in the past. I might try formatting it later on, but it seems odd that the problem only happens occasionally - especially if indeed the card is corrupt. Gets through the Sakura disk check fine, however (when the damn thing boots up

)

 

[9600pro]

Have any of you ¨send the Translated copy to the E-mail:

[email protected]¨ ? (handheldsources request)

I sent all of them on one RAR file today

The Italian one needs some work though. Almost all of the text is too long and it won't fit on the DS screen.

Ok, now i receck all single word in the italian file. Italian grammar is very "complicated" and is not easy to shorten some lines.
I hope the next file is correct.

 

[shadw.w]

With the Sakura 1.34, I got problem to display kanji and hiragana in filenames, I only see "?" instead. It works fine when I boot with the touchpod4.2e and worked fine with the previous version of Sakura 1.12.
Coud it be linked with the font replacement ?

 

[powered_by_tux]

I've been having troubles running Sakura - regardless of how I format it (FAT. FAT32, various allocation sizes, Windows formatter, Panasonic formatter, etc.), I'm lucky to be able to boot it once - usually I get black screens. When it does boot without any problems, all I have to do is turn it off and back on, and it won't boot. When this happens, sometimes I just have to put it into the computer, do ABSOLUTELY nothing to it, then put it back in my M3, and it will boot just fine again - once.

I suspect that my SD card could be a part of the problem, but I'm not certain. I'm using a 2GB Lexar SD (not SDHC) made in Taiwan - probably not the highest quality.

It's also possible that one of the modifications in the custom package is causing some instability, since I can usually get two or three good boots out of the original beta release - the custom pack, as mentioned above, might not even boot the first time.

Any thoughts, suggestions?

Maybe your problem is quite similar to one which I recently had.

Do you have any big files besides the firmware on the SD card? If so, then remove everything but the firmware and see if Sakura starts again. Then do the setup thingy if not already done, disable Disk Check and put the files back on.

 

[Styles420]

@tux: That worked at first, but the problem got worse. Maybe it started with a different problem, then this new one popped up - possibly by coincidence. I hope there isn't a problem with Sakura that managed to destroy my card.

I might have surpassed the read/write life cycle of my card during all the tests and hacking attempts - I play my DS a lot so I had already put a lot of use into the card, so maybe the constant copying of files and reformatting of the card (I read that changing the allocation size to 32 kB would speed up the read/write) just wore it out.

Thanks for the tip, though - I just replaced my SD card (with a class 2 4 gB SDHC from SanDisk), and everything seems to be working fine now. I might still find another use for the old card, maybe for something less volatile (I haven't yet had a problem reading the card on a computer, so I should be able to get a little more life out of it even if it is failing)

Back on topic, I have a question for any knowledgeable programmers out there - any thoughts on the select button problem? It seems to me that if the code has a bug in it, that it should be affecting something more, another button or the select button in other cases (like when the recent files list opens automatically on subsequent boots). Also, how could changing just the region lock and the language files affect this? (That should be all that M3 had to change)

I can't help having suspicions that things aren't all as they seem - that maybe our version of 1.34 is an earlier beta, or that they purposely deactivated/broke some things before giving it to us (seems dumb, but many of us had less-than-kind words for M3 after the moonlight incident). These broken features are the reason I'm still attempting to crack the region lock - I'd rather use a fully functional hacked version than a broken down official release

 

[9600pro]

@Densetsu3000: Fixed version of Italian language, i hope is correct:
http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8IEOBC9Z