Bit Shifter
Offline
Brooklyn NY US

Had a problem this morning with the Smartboy cartridge & reader, in which all my on-cart data was lost. I'm busy enough these days that I sped through the grieving process pretty expediently, and now I just want to know what happened, and how it's possible that on-cart data can be at risk during the backup process. Thought I'd throw this out there in the hopes of getting the informed interpretation of people more technically savvy than myself.

Hardware involved:
  Smartboy cartridge
  Smartboy USB reader/writer
  MacBook Pro laptop running OS 10.6.x

Software involved:
  gbcflsh (or however it's spelled), with settings set up like this: http://i46.tinypic.com/xn8zut.png

I've used this setup dozens of times with no problems. Don't know what was different today. Plugged the reader into the laptop's USB port (the one on the right side, if that matters), reader's green light lit up; plugged the cartridge into the reader, initiated a "read RAM" operation, it aborted a few times (not unusual -- seems to be a known occasional hiccup in the process), finally read the cart "successfully," I checked the resulting .sav file in an emulator, found it blank, redid the process a couple of times with consistent results (blank .sav), decided to check the cart, and voila, an empty instance of LSDJ, no song data at all (empty work RAM, empty file menu).

After screaming "FUCK" a few hundred times, I decided to investigate whether the cart battery was dead. The cart seems to be retaining newly-loaded .sav data now (been about 2 hours), so that suggests the battery can't be totally dead.

So, whatever. Lost data, moving on. At this point though I just want to know WHAT possibly can happen in the process of backing up that stands to actually wipe the on-cart data.

I can accept problems that affect / prohibit getting your cart data onto a computer. But when it turns out that the data on your cartridge is potentially in jeopardy merely by undertaking the act of backing up, then I don't know what the fuck to do.

Any ideas, tech wizards?


edit: for clarity (sort of)

nitro2k01
Offline
Sweeeeeeden

Send the (apparently blank) savs to me, bitsh!

[my nick]@gmail.com

Edit
Theory: The sav was already somehow corrupted because you turned off the 'boy in the wrong moment. Then both the emulator and LSDj running on the 'boy agreed to blank the sav.

Bit Shifter
Offline
Brooklyn NY US

The first few (corresponding to the aborted "Read RAM" operations) were all zero K, so I'm not optimistic about those. But I'll send the first one that had a proper filesize. Thanks nitro.

Any thoughts though about what factors in the backup process actually stand to alter / disrupt the on-cart data?

edit: posted before I saw your edit. Thanks. I'm always careful to make sure playback is stopped before shutting down, so I think that aspect probably isn't the culprit. But who knows.

Kris k
Offline
BK

This advice isn't necessarily re: the smartboy cart and reader, but what I tell just about everyone these days is to back up the save to a Mega Memory Cart before ever trying to hook anything up to a PC.  That way at least you have a backup somewhere in case shit goes down (as it inevitably does). They're not the most robust backup tool, but they're dirt cheap and have saved me quite a few headaches so far.

Bit Shifter
Offline
Brooklyn NY US

That is such a good idea. I have a couple of ancient ones but both are damaged (pins* got bent up somehow). Going to look into getting new ones.

* or whatever you call the little metal parts that make contact with the bottom edge of the cartridge

nitro2k01
Offline
Sweeeeeeden

I looked at the savs. Seems like the power died after all. Either the battery is dying, or it came loose for a short while.

Bit Shifter
Offline
Brooklyn NY US

Aw dang. Well thanks for taking a look nitro, I really appreciate it.

I can't imagine (in this specific case) that the battery had gotten dislodged even momentarily, I treat this stuff pretty gently, and in this case I had been working on the track, wrapped it up, powered off the Game Boy, removed the cartridge, & placed it into the Smartboy reader ever so tenderly, and then began the backup attempt. In other words there was really no opportunity for the cart to get banged around, even accidentally. But who knows. My experience with Game Boy backup hardware has led me to a growing belief that data loss can be triggered by time of day, day of week, position of the planets, El Niño, whether or not you've missed a spot shaving, etc.

So is it superstitious voodoo nonsense on my part to think that there was some sort of combination of circumstances, hardware-wise, that somehow "zapped" the reader & cartridge?

nkogliaz
Offline
Europa surfing on the monolith

nitro2k01,  could ESD be a factor in this equation?

chipocrite
Offline
Philadelphia, PA

The same exact thing happened to me a few months ago. At first I thought the battery had died, but the cart is working and saving just fine now. Even though I too am normally very careful with this stuff, I am also guessing there was an improper shutdown or something. In any case, Kris gave me that advice a while ago, and I'm finally going to heed it. Just ordered one on amazon for a total of $7 with shipping:

http://www.amazon.com/Memory-Gameboy-Or … amp;sr=8-1

nkogliaz
Offline
Europa surfing on the monolith

I had a bit of corruption on an ems cart due to loss of power (ac cord got caught and popped out).      Interesting though, Only the blocks of the file I was working with were corrupted, and the corruption only ranged to scrambling the instrument settings of that file and the rest within that block (odd rows all switched to 13, even rows all switched to 3E all the way across the project), every other block on the card was fine, I transferred the .sav off and formatted the card anyway though however, this has been my only experience with corruption so far, and clearly it was my own fault. xD

nitro2k01
Offline
Sweeeeeeden
nkogliaz wrote:

nitro2k01,  could ESD be a factor in this equation?

ESD, no. Everything is hidden away, so you can hardly touch any connectors even if you wanted to. Now that you mention it though, CMOS latchup might play a role if
1) the smartboy reader is using a certain kind of cartridge connector and
2) id the cartridge was inserted/removed while the unit was powered on.
(3) the brand of SRAM might play a role too; some brands may be better protected against this)

What you need to look for is the pattern on the bottom side of the board, where there's a row of soldered connections.

This is a picture of a GBC board. The cartridge slot is removed, but that doesn't matter. Notice how pins 1-31 are in a straight zig-zag pattern whereas pin 32 is moved a bit up. Pin 32 is ground, and this makes sure ground always makes contact first and breaks last, should you insert or remove the cartridge when the GBC is powered on. If the stupidboy guys used DMG cart slots, pin 32 will also on the same zig-zag line, and it might be susceptible to CMOS latchup.

This is just a theory though, and I'm not sure if this is a real-world concern.

Bit Shifter
Offline
Brooklyn NY US

In an interesting development, it just happened again. Cart's been working fine today, I stopped playback, shut the Game Boy down, nothing out of the ordinary. Plugged the Smartboy reader into my laptop, launched gbcflsh, put the cartridge into the reader, hit "Read RAM," the program "hiccuped" (as it almost always does every time) and aborted on the first try (displaying a status of "Canceled"). I stopped there, waited for the reader's red light to go off (implying the end of whatever operation it was performing), removed the cartridge, checked it in the Game Boy, and boom, blank LSDJ screen, nothing in the file menu.

So — that sucks. Any ideas what this could imply? Is my reader fucked?

Bit Shifter
Offline
Brooklyn NY US

Did a test with expendable data on my now newly-fresh cart. gbcflsh "hiccups" on first read attempt (this time displaying a status of "Timeout") and when loading the cart back in a Game Boy, this time the song is there (sort of) but populated with some garbage data in the song / phrase screens. File name is corrupted and the file menu is also populated with some garbage data. Attempting to reload the song (I'd saved it on the cart prior to testing) results in the "infinite load" issue.

Wouldn't think something could go so wrong with a reader that this sort of thing could happen. Would love to know if anyone has any hypotheses about this. This Smartboy reader's been the only reliable solution until now, and now it's fucking up my world.

PULSELOOPER
Offline
São Paulo, Brazil

Josh, did you solve your reader problem?

Today the smartboy cart FINALLY arrived here in my address, after almost ONE YEAR of that fucking guy giving me the lamest excuses. So far I really like it - actually, I like the fact that I have a reader in which I can use my GBCamera .sav data, and most of all: I don't need to reboot to bootcamp/windows on my mac for writing/reading data. But what you said here really worries me about using the smartboy cart more often than my usual EMS 64m carts.