nesdev.org

hi guyz,

i have a little problem with my PAL chrono trigger.


im telling the story from the beginning:


in january this year i startet to build a chrono trigger pal.
the game was the first i ever build for the snes, and at the beginning it seems to work properly.

but after 5 hours of play... the game freezes and never startet again.

i have tryied to solder the eprom to another donor board (nhl 96).
and the game startet.
this time, after 1 hour of playtime, the game freezes and never startet again.

i have trashed the eproms after this failure.
one week later i startet to build another one, this time with
another rom from an other source.

i soldered all together and put it in my snes.
it starts... the chrono clock was ticking!
i played 5 - 10 min, when you get to leene square... run into marle
and so on... but at the leene square the game freezes!

but why? i dont know... so i trashed the eproms again.

a friend of mine, has send me a new file, already patched and 100 % working. (in his case, it works).

so i soldered this one together.

i hace played it now 14 hours... looked in lavos eye, mouth, ass... dont know what it is ^^ and the game crashes!
now it will not start!

i dont get it, what is the issue with that?

why is it working for hours, then crash and let me sit with open mouth!?

i dont have played football with the cartridge ... there was no earthquake here... the game was only in my snes.. this makes me crazy!

12 eproms did chrono trigger take.. i dont want to make it one more time.. anyone here has any ideas?

i smash my head against a wall...

At least the original (unhacked and untranslated) NTSC Chrono Trigger works fine on my PAL SNES with an adapter, with the exeption of some minor sound glitches here and there.

yeah the original version from my brother runs perfectly too on my snes... it might be the translation, but why is there such a delay?
sometimes it works 14 hours, sometimes 10 min...

i cant figure out why.

That's weird but it sounds like a wrong contact or something like that.

mmhhh i think i got the issue, but how to fix it?

the sram is the error... after the game freezes, i hit reset and nothing happened.
take the cart out... blow in... put it back.. game starts, but all savegames are lost.

somethings shits up the sram but what? and how?

today i have checked all wires (with my eyes and multimeter) and so.. no error.

That SRAM issue is not unique, I had the same problem with a few NES games : When the crash the saves are erased (very likely the CPU is going crazy and accidentally write into SRAM).

Now to guess what causes the CPU crash I can't do it for you... if it systematically crashes at the same place this is a software error. If it crashes randomly it's more likely to be an hardware fault.

when i do nothing, the game freezes.

i play 10 min... go smoking.. come back... freeze!
all savegames lost and i must delete the sram with a 9v battery.

when i play without a pause, the game works nice.

all savegames lost and i must delete the sram with a 9v battery.

What are you talking about ? A 9v battery ? The SRAM should be backed up with a 3V battery. If you don't do that it's no surprise there is problems.

the game has a standart 3v battery.

i use a 9v battery to delete the sram. not to save the sram!


i have read this in a tutorial on ultimate-console, that this is the best way to completely delete the sram.

Oh my god this is so horrible ! I should tell the guy who made that article that he his comletley crazy and that this can likely kill your ships or something.

You can erase saves in CT by pressing start + select on second controller if you really want to.

The best way to erase SRAM (why would you ever need to?) is to disconnect the battery and go do something else for 10 minutes or so. Then connect it again. You definitely shouldn't apply more voltage.

ok ok.. one moment ^^


i must delete the sram, cause its full of garbage data...
the game cannot boot up while the data is in there.

so i have deletet the sram manually via a 9v battery.

i hope that i have not burned up any chips on the pcb with the 9v
battery.

next time i desolder the battery for 10 min and it should be fine.


but this problem cant be the issue, why chrono trigger crashed for
the first time... i have only used the 9v battery after the crash, not before.

I've never heard of corrupt data stopping a game from booting. Generally a game will have a checksum to determine if saved data is valid and not attempt to load that data if it fails and generally it will be erased if corrupt.

No idea what your problem is though. If your ROM is translated maybe the translation doesn't work on real hardware properly.

MottZilla wrote:I've never heard of corrupt data stopping a game from booting. Generally a game will have a checksum to determine if saved data is valid and not attempt to load that data if it fails and generally it will be erased if corrupt.

That doesn't help if the save data passes the checksum but is otherwise inconsistent, such as an armor type that's unused, or any of several attributes that are supposed to be two digits but are actually between 100 and 255. Real world glitch example: Catching Missingno. in the Pokemon games for Game Boy will screw up your Hall of Fame even if it doesn't screw up the checksum.

Good point, I suppose the kinds of checks they do aren't very solid. But I can't think of why Chrono Trigger save data could cause the game to not boot or crash and be unsolvable by starting a fresh game.