I wish there was a reliable source for reproduction carts that don't fail after 15 hours of play timeLike hmmm do I pay for the $15 Chinese copy of emerald that will fail in 15 hours, the $50 Chinese copy of emerald that will fail in 15 hours or the $400 authentic copy of emerald?
Why do they fail? I have many bootleg NES cartridges from the 90's and they all still work just as well as genuine ones.
>>58963630
>>58963502just get the ones from insidegadgets, i've had no problems with them they're virtually the same qualitywiseyour other option is to get a GBxCart or a GBOperator and test all the repros you buy online to see which ones are good, which might be more fun, but also more expensive
>>58963502You want my suggestion?buy an R4 GBA thing, obtain the fake shell and sticker off of a copy of pokemon emerald, and use that as the housing for the device.
>>58963630Official GBA cartridges use parallel nor flash, which is a chip who's sole job is to take and then retain your saves, while the main rom chip stores the game assets.For chinese bootlegs having a separate chip for assets and a chip for saving isn't worth the effort, so they have one big chip that has a portion of it reserved for storing save data, and something called SRAM that will transport your save into this big chip.The problem is that SRAM is both power hungry and sensitive, which is a bad combination because these factories generally care less about the quality of their PCBs (the thing holding all the chips together)The result of having these cheap PCBs with a sensitive SRAM is that if your cartridge at any time has some kind of voltage spike or drop mid-save, the SRAM will essentially drop your save, and your data will be gone.Official cartridges not only have much more reliable PCBs that have a super consistent voltage (yay japanese engineering), but they use flash which is far less volatile or power hungry, and for pokemon games specifically they coded the cartridge to hold 2 saves at once, the one you booted at the start of play, and the one you created when you hit SAVE, if the latter one corrupts because of power issues, it goes back to the first.Bootlegs don't have this double save holding, the SRAM transports your new save, deletes the old save in the rom chip, then writes the new save into the rom chip, but step 1 happens in microseconds, so if there's power problems it almost always happens in step 2 or 3, and in both cases your entire save is gone.
