Flickering


meko

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Jun 23, 2005
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I think I wrecked my gp32 or smc...

I just got it today, and everything I tried was working fine. I tried DrMD and it worked great (after switching to the Taiwanese screen option. Does that mean mine is blu+?), smash gp, elena, and a few other things. Later I put road rash and road rash 3 into drmd to see how they would run, and after I opened road rash, the screen began to flicker white badly, then froze. Same thing for RR3. I restarted and went back to DrMD but.. the flicker was now there, in the DrMD menu. I tried to run Sonic which had worked perfectly before, and it had a really bad flicker, and froze a few seconds in. The flicker is really, really bad, you can barely see what is happening at all. It's really white, sometimes only over every other line, sometimes the full screen, sometimes completely making the entire lcd display white. I tried to delete the RR games from DrMD and it froze... so I turned it off and back on, and they were gone, but the flicker was still there... I tried Smash GP and Elena after that to see if it would happen, and it did... the flicker was happening in each game (though, not the gp32 main screen, pc-link, or in the loader menu)...

So I opened GP32 manager and formatted the smc, and put smash gp back on... and it's still doing it, even worse than before! It didn't happen with Little Wizard, but happens with anything on my smc...

please tell me it's just that one smc and my gp32 will still work fine with other ones... and if it is, is there any way to fix that smc..?
 
Try replacing the batteries. That happens when the batteries are starting to run out.
 
Well, did you buy it brand new, or did you buy it used from someone on ebay or something? There might be something wrong with it... but before we jump to conclusions about that, is there a cpu clock setting in SmashGP? I know there is in DrMD... Wherever you got it, it's supposed to be 166mhz, right? If you changed the cpu speed to 166, try lowering it to 156 or 150. Even though it's supposed to run at 166, sometimes it won't, depending on what program you're using. I noticed mine crashes at 166 and freezes sometimes at 156 with OSNES9xGP. And yes, it's a BLU+. If you didn't mess with the CPU speed, then I have no idea what's wrong with it. It could be a problem with the screen or something.
 
the batteries thing helped a lot, it's still flickering a little bit, but nowhere near as bad as before, it's hardly noticable now. thanks so much! :) do gp32s flicker when batteries get run down or are poor quality?

and how come little wizard and the menus were all working perfectly but only smc programs flickered?
 
If it's only flickering a little bit after replacing the batteries, it may be an overclocking problem as magus said. Try running one of the simpler homebrew games and see if it still flickers. It might be the batteries if the quality of them is poor because the 24 batteries/$3 that I got started to run out and the screen started to flicker almost immediately after playing FGB.
 
meko posted on Jul 9 2005 at 12:56 AM said:
the batteries thing helped a lot, it's still flickering a little bit, but nowhere near as bad as before, it's hardly noticable now. thanks so much! :) do gp32s flicker when batteries get run down or are poor quality?

and how come little wizard and the menus were all working perfectly but only smc programs flickered?


Well, if you are messing with the clock speed, that would make sense... Because the GP32 is made to run at 133mhz, so all games made for it by GamePark themselves will run at 133mhz. If you're changing the clock speed on any of your programs, that's probably what's doing it. If not, it could be that you're using crappy batteries... or maybe even a combination.
 
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well, the clockspeed could be a major factor because most homebrew is 133Mhz or higher and Little wizards is 66Mhz
 
oh... nevermind, I thought that all the commercial games ran at 133... well either way, the clockspeed's still a likely suspect.
 
meko posted on Jul 9 2005 at 04:56 AM said:
the batteries thing helped a lot, it's still flickering a little bit, but nowhere near as bad as before, it's hardly noticable now. thanks so much! :) do gp32s flicker when batteries get run down or are poor quality?

and how come little wizard and the menus were all working perfectly but only smc programs flickered?


Some programs will flicker slightly at all times. It all depends how the coder handles the screen code etc. Nothing to worry about. The other problem was definetly batteries. The higher the clock speed the more the power drain. So some programs may work fine because they are running slower clock, but as soon as you overclock BAM the power drain is to much and the GP32 will flicker/lock up. Time to recharge the batteries.
 
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