Mysterious Rom Loading Problems. Sd Card?

[Shirohagen]

Hi guys

Sorry to post such a dull topic, but I'm havijng a hell of a time with my GP2X recently and I was hoping someone would be able to help. Everything has always been fine with the unit, and after using a 1Gb Sandisk card, I upgraded to a 2Gb Viking card which worked fine.

After not using the GP2X for a while I'm finding that some of the emulators aren't running properly. Things like Frodo are fine, but DrMD and SquidgeSNES won't load roms. The emulators run fine, but any loading of a rom just leaves it on a blank screen. I've tried Picodrive for MD instead and that suffers from the same problem. GP2X games like Sudoku and Tilematch work fine.

Not sure why, but it 'feels' like it is the SD Card at fault.

I've reformatted the card and started from scratch several times, formatting it in a card reader, through USB, on my Mac, and also using Virtual PC in Windows XP. Only my camera will format it (FAT16) to recognise the whole 2Gb, so if I use Windows to format it as FAT32 I lose 1Gb! No matter how I do it, DrMD will not load roms.

I've tried using it from batteries as well as my mains adapter.

I've tried redownloading all the emulators afresh.

I've tested the roms on my Mac, and they run fine with the emulators on my laptop.

I've just even tried running DrMD from the NAND, with a test rom, but that didin't work, so perhaps it isn't the card after all...? I'm on firmware 2.0.0, still as I received it from GBAX.

Any ideas? I can use it to run some stuff, but obviously I'm pretty gutted at not being able to use DrMD! I'm at a loss now to think of what else I could try.

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[TelcoLou]

This is going to seem like a cop-out, but ....

Use PicoDrive instead. Trust me ... I even started over my Kid Chameleon quest using PicoDrive, since my old save states on DrMD no longer worked.

 

[Shirohagen]

Thanks for the tip...

Good idea, but I've tried Picodrive and it's the same. What is it about the apps (or roms) that won't work that makes them different from stuff I'm having no trouble with?

I'm very confused...

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[Shikaku]

Try reinstalling the firmware...

 

[Shirohagen]

OK, well I could reinstall the firmware I guess, but I've never changed it at all from new and it used to work OK. I'm just a little reluctant to mess with the firmware as I've had one GP2X die on me during the process, and particularly because it's difficult for me to format an SD Card to FAT32 for upgrading purposes through Virtual PC...

It's a good suggestion Shikaku, and I'll definatley try it as a last resort. Do you think specifically it will help in a particular way or was it just a general suggestion? It's certainly one of the only things I haven't tried, it's just I don't want to do it unnecessarily if I can help it.

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[Shirohagen]

Update: I've come to suspect my card reader, and so in combination with GP2X USB link being a bit flaky anyway, I've decided to try and get a new card reader to rule that out...

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[Goity]

You tried your old SD?

 

[Shirohagen]

Hey Goity, thanks for the suggestion, but I've tried that and it's the same.

I've also bought a new card reader and had no luck!

Perhaps my cards are all corrupted somehow and anew one would work. I still don't understand why some things like Frodo work fine but DrMD won't.

Can't keep throwing money at the problem, perhaps a firmware upgrade will help...

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[gmiller1018]

There are some free SD formatter programs that can reformat (not recover any files) from different companies:

www.ivrtech.net/files/F4267AZE.EXE (CNetX)
www.ivrtech.net/files/sdfv2000.exe (Matsushita Electric Industrial Co., Ltd. )

There is also one called Image Rescue 2.0.5 that I spent money on (from Lexar) that did not do any good either, but my SD (viking 512 Mb) may have been totally screwed by then.

I tried these on an SD that would not map to a driver letter on Windows and under Linux reported a size of 20Gb but was unable to force the data back to something reasonable. Generally I would say if it works for some programs and not others then it is doubtful that the SD card is at fault.

Since the FW update is reasonably easy I would try the one of the 2 series, they are in the archives.

 

[Shirohagen]

Thanks for the links, I use a Mac, so while I can run those in Virtual PC, I really need a more convenient way to format the SD Cards. Why doesn't the GP2X firmware itself just include a 'Format SD Card' option? That way we would have nice clean 100% compatible cards no matter what computer setup we had. Pacrom on the old GP32 had this, so I'm not sure why the GP2X can't do it...

Anyway, I bought a new card reader which after some fiddling has allowed me to format my 2Gb card as FAT32 so that's progress.

As for the roms loading, after trying everything else, I downloaded some 'fresh' Megadrive roms on the off-chance and found them to work fine on my newly formatted card. This is obviously good news, but it does mean my old ROM collection has somehow been corrupted and is now useless on the GP2X (although strangely they all still run fine on Mac or Windows emulators!)

Still confused, but at least now I'm back up and running - I've just got to replace almost my entire ROM collection if I want to play then on the GP2X that's all!

Weird.

Thanks for all the suggestions though guys...

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[clarky2o2o]

you are not alone Im having this problem with the coleco vision (both) and the new gba emulator. i did consider that it was my OS trying to get my card as readyboost. I havent had any problems till recently Im using firmware 2.1.1 :angry:

Neo Geo emu runs fine same as old gamboy emu (forgotten which 1 i got) video and mp3 playback are ok too.