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[Diablo]

Welcome to the site.

Are you also playing on a DS as well?  Do you have a GBA/GBA SP which you could try the Supercard on?  Do you have another CF you could try with the Supercard?  Did chkdsk find any problems with your CF?  Can you play smaller games fine (like NES or GB, or even GBC games)?  Have you tried patching the ROMs with no options enabled to see if they still crash?

When and where did you order your Supercard from?  If you say Kicktrading, then I think it's possible they may have a batch of faulty Supercards on their hands.

[C_L_M]

=)

i play on a ds only
i can't test on a gba or gba sp

chkdsk did not find any problems

for the smaller games i do have to use a emulator? (i did not try this yet)

i patched the roms also with out any options - didnt change anything. (with patching you mean add roms with the supercard programm?)

i bought it in germany from "C&ZV Rainer Benda". i also "reinstalled" the latest firmware.

in detail games that i tryed: mario world 2, zelda link to the past, golden sun... they all freezed

i forgot to mention that wario ware inc and wario land 4, both seems to work....

[Diablo]

Yes, I mean patching using the Supercard software.

To play any game besides a GBA game on the Supercard an emulator is used.  Emulators for NES, GB/GBC, PCE/TG-16, and SMS/GG are all built-in to the Supercard, so all you need to do is copy the pure ROM to the Supercard in order to play them.  However, since you listed the games you've tried, the size of the ROMs is obviously not an issue (unless your copy or Super Mario Advance 2 is corrupt or overdumped).

Have you verified your ROMs?  You can use GBA-Renamer to first identify your dumps, then GoodGBA with the GoodGUI frontend to verify them.

[C_L_M]

ok.... i tryed to check my roms with the named tool(s)

after renameing them i get a list of my rom dumps (using GoodGBA with the GoodGUI) with some nubers and so ... but how do i see if they are corrupt??

[Diablo]

The "GoodCodes.txt' file in the GoodGBA folder will explain what the new names mean. :wink:

[Deadmon]

EDIT: Seens nvs was right, it was my flashcard apparently..I was able to use my dad's 512 Sandisk CF card also, but that also froze up on the DS also. Getting desperate, I found a 16 Canon MB CF card, and tried Zelda on it, and guess what, the game ran smoothly. I played about an hour then stopped.

Strange how 2 512 Sandisk cards didn't work, but a 16 MB Canon did. I also find it weird that nvs's 512 Sandisk works for him, but 2 of them don't work for me. =/

[nvs]

Did you try using one of the SanDisk cards and pulling it out immediately after the game loads?  I suspect this will work (it's not a nice solution, however, because reinserting the card is likely to cause a crash).

What type of SanDisk CF cards are they, standard blue sticker units or the Ultra/UltraIIs?

It seems specific to the DS, but I wonder exactly what's at fault here, the Supercard or the CF card.  

See if you can source another large CF card and give it another go.  Bit of hit and miss, I guess.

[ghod]

Having the same exact problem with my NDS and figured I would chime in here to see if maybe we can get these issues solved.  I orderd my SuperCard from hopebuy.com and got it in yestarday. I do not have a GBA SP to test my SuperCard with, but this problem seems isolated to the NDS anyway.

I have a 256mb SanDisk card (Front: blue w/ red header Back: White) which works perfectly fine in my Canon digital camera.  For the SuperCard I went though all the proper steps (Formatting with FAT filesystem, running chkdsk, upgrading firmware, etc). My card is able to play every movie, music, and emulator I have tried fine (some of which are 16+ Mbytes).

When playing GBA ROMSs my NDS crashes randomly (not at the same spot every time).  When it crashes I get screen flicker and horrible screeching from the speakers After reading this forum I tried yanking the CF card out after the SuperCard loads the ROM and all the games work perfectly.  This is obviously not a good solution, but at least a step in the right direction.  Currently all my GBA ROMs only have the "Enable Save" patch installed, but I intend on trying different combinations of patches later to see what happens.

Edit: After further inspection it also seems the ROM size dosen't matter either as 4Mbyte ROMS lock up just as randomly as 16Mbyte ROMs

[Diablo]

I think it's safe to say that there seems to be some CF cards that don't work on the DS as well as they do on the GBA.

Keep up the detective work, fellas.  You'll get to the bottom of this mystery. :wink:


EDIT:  Any of you willing to format your CF cards a few more times?  Have you tried changing the cluster sizes to see if that is the problem?  I'd start low (512b) and work my way up.

[ghod]

EDIT:  Any of you willing to format your CF cards a few more times?  Have you tried changing the cluster sizes to see if that is the problem?  I'd start low (512b) and work my way up.

Hey, if there is a chance that it will make things work properly, I am all for it.  I will try after I get home from work later(if I have the time) and report back.

I have also emailed tech support to see if they have any wisdom to share.

[C_L_M]

are you shure that this all has to with the cf / cf type?

as far as i understand this... the sc loads the file from cf into sdram - at this moment he read the file from cf - while running the file is in sdram - and this should have nothing to do with the cf anymore (so removing the cf after loading doesnt make sense at all). only when he has a reading errors while loading the file it could load a corrupt file.... but a deffekt cf should also have reading errors when reading a file with a card reader (via usb) - so this is what let me think that it is not so plausible that the cf is the cause of the errors.

maybe the supercards cf interface is defect / not so "good" build - so that the read data is corrupt while reading here.... but would the system recognise such a false data file - and start it anyway. and why this would happen only with nds ( is it the same with all nds? does it hapen with gba too...) [how could you test the cf interface in the sc....?

result: i hope that this all is a matter of a "not realy nds compatible firmware" of the sc causing this errors with nds  .... i hope we could find the cause....

-=^_^=-

[Diablo]

You're right:  the ROM is loaded into the Supercard's SRAM, and the CF is no longer used from that point on (until saving, of course).  However, since it appears that most (all?) that are experiencing this problem are doing so with Sandisk CF cards.

Therefore, I'm wondering if Sandisk has arranged the data structure in these CF cards in a peculiar manner, and the Supercard is not use to/expecting that, but on the GBA it still worked so Romman did nothing to remedy the problem.  Perhaps the DS hardware just isn't as forgiving with these errors?  Of course, the fact that it apparently only occurs with DS systems and not GBA/GBA SP systems can probably be attributed to the fact that Romman did not have the time or resources to test extensively with the DS hardware and optimize the Supercard for it.

That's why I said if you're willing to try changing the cluster size of the memory (perhaps to a size more optimized for the Supercard and DS hardware), it couldn't hurt.  However, I have a feeling this is just a case of pure incompatibility between hardware (due to the previously mentioned lack of testing).

We shall see, shall we not?

BTW, have any of you tried repairing the MBR on your CF cards?

[C_L_M]

However, since it appears that most (all?) that are experiencing this problem are doing so with Sandisk CF cards.

i use a kingston. i will test with other format options.

how is it - if you upload a "corrupt" rom file (alter the patched file with a text editor befpr updoading) does the game start ? if not - so that the gmb / nds recognizes a corrupt rom file i think it would be another indiz for a (firmware) incompatibility of the sc - i gues ;-)

btw ... i tested my roms with the tools - one result is:

xxx name of rom xxx [f1]  - this should be ok? this was a game i tryed and - no wonder - it crashed...


PS:

i tryed some old nes and gameboy games with the build in emus - those things seem to work... another hint that it has nothing to do with the cf?

[ghod]

Tonight on my way home from work I purchased a 512MB Kodak CF card.  Still no luck.

Previously in this thread nvs said that he/she had no luck with Lexar, but SanDisk cards worked in his/her NDS system, and unfortunately when I turned the Kodak card over it said it was made by Lexar.  Of interest though nvs said that a SanDisk card worked fine for him/her, but haven't for some of us.

Not only did my new 512mb Kodak/Lexar card not work, but it made the system crash MUCH more quickly than my 256MB SanDisk card (I didn't even have time to rip the CF card out before it locked up).  

Also, as per Diablo's recomendation, I have tried reformatting both of my CF cards using every possible "Allocation unit size" that would work rangeing from 16k to 8096k.

It probably means nothing, but I also noticed that the new 512MB Lexar card(which crashed faster) also formatted much faster.

[Deadmon]

Did you try using one of the SanDisk cards and pulling it out immediately after the game loads?  I suspect this will work (it's not a nice solution, however, because reinserting the card is likely to cause a crash).

What type of SanDisk CF cards are they, standard blue sticker units or the Ultra/UltraIIs?

It seems specific to the DS, but I wonder exactly what's at fault here, the Supercard or the CF card.  

See if you can source another large CF card and give it another go.  Bit of hit and miss, I guess.

Standard blue sticker ones...even though I have 2 kinds. (One blue sticker has a little rainbow, the other is just two different colours of blue)