Loading Problem With New 180 Blu

[Shirohagen]

Hi guys

I've been away for a while as I sold my FLU and was waiting for my new 180 BLU to arrive. Well after an age, I finally received it yesterday! The problem is, it won't f**king work!

While I was GP32less I used my 128Mb SMC in my camera, but backed up all the files first. Once I got my BLU, I put all my GP32 files back on it and expected everything to work. Problem is most things load, but crash when they expect to load some data. For instance Frodo won't load ROMS, saying "Device not present error" or fSMS which hangs on the ROM scanning part. Other stuff won't load at all like SCUMM or Speccyal. The confusing part is that games like Pinball Dreams work fine and the Gamepark Firmware can see all my files on the SMC, so there is obviously something fairly specific at the heart of it (A particular type of file operation?).

I expect it is something with my SMC, (although I don't understand how) but I can't format the card which I originally did with Pacrom on my FLU, as I only have the new BLU firmware. I use a Mac too so can't use Windows or PC Link to format it.

Is my SMC or GP32 at fault? Any suggestions? I'm trying everything I can think of in the meantime...

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[lizard808uk]

You can format your card in the euro firmware, go to PC link and press select.

 

[Shirohagen]

Cheers, but I did that a caouple of times and it said it had "Recovered" the SMC, but never seemed to disturb the contents like a format would. At the moment I'm trying to use MacLink to format the SMC to see if that works.

Has anyone else experienced this loading problem? (Ignoring the Mac aspect!)

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[craigix]

Quickest way to rule out that its not the GP32's SMC reader is to try another SMC card if you can borrow one.

We will have tested it before sending it with GPquake, Fgen, the clock speed tester and Osnes, how do they work?

-Craig

www.gbax.com

 

[Shirohagen]

Hi

Thanks for the pointers Craig, I think I've fixed it now...

Mr Mirkos clocktester ran fine but FGEN hung on the title screen, Osnes couldn't load a ROM and I never tried Quake. I tried 2 SMC cards, but the problem persisted because I couldn't find a way of formatting them that the GP32 would accept.

In the end I formatted the SMC with the commandline Maclink in the Terminal of OSX. I couldn't get any other way to work, so as soon as I can I'll flash to Multifirmware and get Pacrom on there to format SMCs.

My backup of the SMC didn't work when it was all copied over to the fresh card, but curiosly it works if I copy things over one at a time from disk, so I guess I was suffering from a combination of not being able to format the SMC correctly and having corrupt files from the last SMC backup I did. It took me a while to figure that out as even though the card was formatted the problem remained until I used "fresh" files. It was interesting how all the different apps were handling it by crashing or hanging in their own unique way. This is what was scaring me!

Thanks for the advice, *hopefully* I'll be back up to speed soon...

...good to be back!



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[woogal]

There's no need to flash to use pacrom, you can just split the fxe out of the bin. Here you go - http://gp32.sector808.org/pacrom.fxe (not the latest version, but just one I found on spiv's site)

 

[Shirohagen]

Cheers Woogal, I didn't think I'd be able to do that as I wasn't sure using a program on the SMC to format that SMC would be possible would it? That's why I wanted to flash to firmware (among other reasons)

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[woogal]

It should be possible because the whole program will be loaded into memory and it won't actually need to read from the smc again.