nesdev.parodius.com

[powerpakuser]

Hey everyone..

I'm a new user but an occasional reader / visiter. I posted this over at the nesworld forums and I'm not sure how you all feel about crossposting but there really hasn't been any leads on their end. I figured I'd try here as this is a little more "specialty" for the subject matter.

I'll just cut and paste from there...once again apologies if this isn't allowed.

*snip*

I purchased a powerpak some time ago and I've noticed some strange behavior...particularly with Super Mario Bros 3 (and yes I own the original cart..albeit sealed in the box).

My SMB3 rom used to work great when I was using the 1.11 mappers and when I saw the 1.12 update I jumped for it. Well, after I put it on the card I went to go play several of the games and noticed odd behavior. SMB2 was glitched out (playable...but extremely glitched) and SMB3 would start in world 1 as usual but had a world 8 color scheme, lullaby music, and wouldn't allow you to go anywhere on the map. Odd. Also, now Kirby's Adventure doesn't seem to work either but truth be told I'm not sure if it ever did.

So fast forward several months after an extremely busy season at work to now. I tried to fire up the SMB3 rom again thinking it might be different this time (??) and it obviously didn't change. Still strange looking level map w/ glitched out images. So I go and dl several different SMB3 roms (remember I OWN the original!) and all of them return the same exact screen. hrmmph

I thought that maybe if I go back to the 1.11 mappers it would solve the problem. Nope! It did however change the map slightly. So I put the 1.12 mappers back on the cf and now the new changed world map is the one that loads instead of the old one. Almost as though the nes has a cache. Oddly enough though SMB2 works now...kirby still doesn't.

I've tried to contact retrozone in the past with no luck.

It's most certainly more than the glitching that was described in past reviews. This is pretty much creating new screens / music and roms such as smb2 and smb3 do not work along with several others. I can see if this cart has seen abnormal usage but it still *smells* new.

*snip*

Well there you have it folks..not really sure what the issue is here.
Any help is *extremely* appreciated on this matter. I've also tried different nes toaster systems for testing with no luck...

Fingers crossed!

[BMF54123]

Huh, interesting. Mine's had weird stability issues since shortly after I got it, and they're progressively getting worse. About 3/4 times I power it up, it either goes straight to a garbled screen or runs into filesystem problems. Once I do get it working, any games that use mappers and/or WRAM are just about as likely to glitch out or freeze entirely, and there are a few games I can't get running at all anymore. Mapperless games, on the other hand, seem to work fine every time. I've tried different resistor values (for the resistor mod discussed some time ago), several different NES revisions, and different brands/speeds of CF cards, all to no avail. None of these would explain why it's getting worse over time, though.

(I don't mean to hijack your topic, but perhaps our cart problems are related, and bunnyboy does pop in here every now and then...)

[powerpakuser]

So I guess I'm SOL then huh?

What is that resistor mod supposed to do exactly? Not sure if that would help in my case anyway...I don't really see a connection between a few resistors and a rom generating new screens.

Nice to hear that it's not just myself having issues with it.

Didn't realize that this purchase was at your own risk!

[BMF54123]

About the resistor mod: the very first run of carts was found to have bus conflicts, which caused varying degrees of sprite glitching, depending on the NES used. Subsequent runs had a resistor package added just above the edge connector to fix this. Unless you bought your cart right after they went on sale (like I did), it probably already has this. Check out this thread for more details.

As far as I know, this fix *only* solves the sprite glitching problem, and is probably not related to the issues you're experiencing...