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BTW, just another idea of what might be wrong. Did you program the microcontroller fuses, and not just the hex file? Without the fuses configured, the crystal won't be set oscillate, and the FTDI chip can't communicate. (The crystal is shared between the chips, and the microcontroller is driving it.)

Yup.

In the interest of promoting sample playback glitchiness, there's something else you can do. There are four 256 byte lookup tables that are for two channel wave mixing. This is the dist setting, which you can normally set to clip, shap, shap2 or wrap. If you hold A and pressing left or right 4 times beyond the leftmost or rightmost setting, you can use data from anywhere in the memory map for this table. Most of it just sounds harsh, but worth checking out. This only works when there's a sample on BOTH the software channels, otherwise this table is not used, and you will hear no difference.

Could you tell me the LSDj version you're using and share the save file with me?

Only the newer adapter, which has a red circuit board, has support for MIDI. The older one can only be used for file transfers. (Save data/software update.) You also need to mack sure the adapter's mode is set correctly, which you can do by running SYNC.bat included with the NL software for Windows. (Not sure if/how you can do this in OSX.)

If you really, really care about getting this board diagnosed/fixed you could send it to me. Qualifications: Working on a new flasher project on my own, nowadays quite comfortable soldering even the smaller SMD variant used for the FTDI chip on the newer programmers.

First I need to ask, has it ever worked, to any capacity? Exactly how does it not work? When you plug it in, do you see a USB device n the device manager? Exactly which FTDI chip is that? Have you programmed the AVR chip? Using which method?

My first reaction is that it's indeed the soldering around the SMD chip which is the main problem. The first problem is that some of the pins may lack enough solder to make reliable contact. The second more serious problem is the flux residue. The flux, depending on type - needs to be cleaned off. What appears to be happening is corrosion from the flux residue is starting to eat the tracks. In particular the ground connection to the FTDI chip (the middle connection on the left side of the image, going out to the big copper lane.) I'm not sure from the image whether that's just dirt or if it's corrosion that has eaten all the way through.

Different problems have different causes. Things like crashes and a corrupted logo can be caused by bad contact. Eg, dirt, misaligned cartridge connector and perhaps easy to overlook, that the cartridge/cartridge connector is slightly bent from internal pressure from a backlight panel or other mod, which might also cause bad contact.

The "dark screen" problem on the other hand is never caused by bad cartridge slot contact.That is purely an electrical problem, caused by varying power consumption when the CPU is power save mode. When the CPU's power consumption goes varies, so does the LCD voltage. There's not really a way to completely fix that without redesigning the power supply circuit. The easiest way to fix the dark screen problem is probably to edit the LSDj ROM, like I said above.

I think the Nanoloop problem is a bad contact problem, and you may have luck not inserting the card-tridge (haha) fully and see if that makes a difference. You might also want to try to burn the version of the ROM that doesn't have the custom "hello" logo. Click the following link and scroll own to "Scrolling Logo" You need a Nanoloop MIDI adapter to update the ROM.

http://www.nanoloop.de/midi/one.html

That the screen going black is related to LSDj's power saving feature, in conjunction with other parameters like GB type, possibly the condition of the unit (dried capacitors) as well as battery type/quality/health.

The brute force way of solving the problem would be disable LSDj's power saving feature. Older versions used to have a setting for this in the menu screen, but newer versions don't, and instead turn off power saving when playing the song, and keeping it on otherwise. You can however still disable it by editing the ROM. Open the ROM in a hex editor and look for 76 00 C9. There should probably only be one occurrence of this string in the file. Change 76 to 00. In the latest version of LSDj as of now, 4.7.3, this instruction is at address 4B9.

Keep in mind that this *will* drain your batteries slightly faster.