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DS Flash Equipment > Pirated card NDS problem

#50848 - Mr Snowflake - Sat Aug 13, 2005 8:42 pm

Well this could sound bad, but its actually pretty strange.

My little brother went on holliday with my mother to Hungary. He bought there a gba game, which he tought of was just a legal game. But it turned out to be a pirated copy, because the first game he got had some save problems, and they would refund, so he chose another game. Point is: this gba game works perfect on a real gba, but when in a ds, it freezes right after the colorfull nintendo logo.

Now, my questions are:
- Is there nothing we can do to get this game going, because he paid for it, although it is illegal.
- Why doesn't it work on a ds, which I find stranger, because the ds has only 1 bit different from the gba bios.

Oh, I tried the game in 2 ds's and they both didn't work.

#50849 - tepples - Sat Aug 13, 2005 8:53 pm

Perhaps the timing tolerances are tighter with the Nintendo DS than with the GBA, especially given that the DS's ARM7 starts up in double speed (DS) mode, and the pirate cart can't keep up.

Have you tried cleaning the contacts?

Have you tried opening the cart? It might be flashable.
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#50852 - Rohaq - Sat Aug 13, 2005 8:56 pm

Return for a refund, report his ass if you don't get a refund, unless they're back from Hungary, in which case you probably won't be able to get the cart working in a DS, but if you run into save problems, open the cart up and replace the battery with a decent one.
_________________
Rohaq

#50872 - abigsmurf - Sun Aug 14, 2005 1:21 am

Perhaps a voltage issue?

considering the DS and GBA use different batteries with different drains, it's possible that the DS isn't providing the voltage the GBA can provide. As it's a pirate cart I doubt it's manufactered to Nintendo specifications and their QC, there may only be a tiny difference but that could be all thats needed for it not to work.

#50898 - Mr Snowflake - Sun Aug 14, 2005 10:45 am

Well I opened it and it's a lot different from my original zelda cartridge. It has on the front side a big chip (26l6420mc-90) with a battery and on the back side a smaller chip (ut62l1024lc). How can see if it's flashable?

#52218 - theBrave - Sun Aug 28, 2005 2:32 pm

The big one seems to be an flash chip.
The little one is some SRAM.

Weird, there should be some circuitry to handle adress conversion and refreshing sram.

So it seem to be flashable but you may need to make your own writer hardware/software.

Do you have pictures of it ?