Help with a EMS USB cart, please... (Page 1 of 3)

For the energy save one, press hold A and left on the D-pad until it cycles back into the right range of values.

The page 1 issue is fairly well known by now. Page issues could indicate a faulty capacitor on the cartridge board and/or weak batteries in your Gameboy. The cartridge uses a capacitor to "sense" if the GB's power has been cycled quickly or not. If this capacitor is not holding a proper charge or has become shorted it's possible that the page changing circuit will freak out. This has been reported so much that I suspect there may have been a bad batch of capacitors that went through at EMS. I have never been in possession of a misbehaved cartridge yet so I cannot confirm this explanation, but it's the best one I have been cable to come up with. The only other one I can think of is that the cap isn't draining properly (drain load not looked up properly etc) but again, I haven't had to test this because mine has always worked. You could see if Nonfinite will cover replacement, wait until someone develops a fix, or keep using it with LSDJ on both banks.

However, there is one thing you should know: the cartridge will not, even when it's working properly, cycle reliably between bank 1 and bank 2 just by flicking the power switch back and forth. To get from bank 1 to bank 2 you are supposed to flick it off and then on again, but to get back to bank 1 without corruption you need to power the GB off for long enough to reset that capacitor "sense" circuit. For most working carts this delay is only a couple of seconds, but if yours is working improperly you might want to try longer.

Last edited by arfink (Oct 16, 2010 9:24 pm)

Yeah, or ask someone to "re-cap" your old GBs to put some new life into the worn power supply. I suspect more and more people will be looking to do this as even the nearly ubiquitous gameboy DMG continues to become harder to find in working order. Good luck!

The problem isn't old caps in the DMGs making the EMS carts freak out- AFAIK it's in the cart itself. Bad caps in the DMG does things like make the power supply less efficient and more noisy and degrade the sound quality. Bleepbloop carts don't have a bankswitching thing like the 64m EMS carts do, so they won't behave like this, however you may wind up kicking yourself if you buy a bleepbloop cart. There have been serious supply issues with bleepbloop carts, and Nonfinite has so many customers that people sometimes slip through the cracks. So you could wind up paying and waiting for months. Also, for me at least, the bleepbloop carts have a tarnished name, having been developed by stealing someone else's work. However, it's your decision, and alot of people are quite happy with the new redesigned non-GPL-violating bleepbloop carts.

If you do decide to buy an EMS cart, buy it from Kitsch. He ships faster and he's got good customer service. (Shameless plug, I know. Get over it. )

Oh lovely. Didn't know he was still violating GPL. Good to know.

nitro2k01 can give you all the details on the bleepbloop GPL violation fiasco, so give him a PM. There was tons of info on the 8bc forums at one time, but Jose nuked it to protect himself. As for the chances of you getting a normal EMS cart I'd say it's fairly high. And if it's not working, Kitsch will almost certainly accept a return and either replace or refund. He's awesome like that.

EDIT: we try to avoid bringing the Jose-bashing into CM.O since alot of people here got booted/offended by Jose. So yeah, PMs will be good since most people here have heard the story too many times.

Last edited by arfink (Oct 18, 2010 4:12 pm)

e-mail me if you don't get a reply on replacing this another way.  i'm generally able to help out in some fashion.  If not directly, then hopefully via EMS (through us, as they tend to cater to us a little bit more).

regarding your powercycling issue.....  and the issue with the cart....  and because i enjoy doing research on this stuff because it affects me.....

1) on the back of the cartridge, there should be a numerical code stamped in the plastic.  what is this code?
2) have you tried taking the cart out of the gameboy, waiting, then trying to get to menu 1?  sometimes that helps if the cart is getting hung-up in menu 2. 
3) lastly, the 1-2 second wait time EMS mentions (in one of their manuals at least) is a joke....  its more like 10-15 seconds on most carts.  a longer wait, but who cares, since you get two menus   (provided they work unlike your cart apparently).

actually, i should maybe say.........  if people need cart help ask (PM or whatnot).  i answer e-mails all the freakin' time from people who aren't customers of ours and can't get help, so its something i really don't mind doing.... unless it becomes a burden which it isn't right now at all. 

that goes for you, mountainhead, as well as anyone else in a shit-storm with a cart.  from us, or not.