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orangeglo / everdrive-gba-editor

Build a custom theme for your EverDrive GBA!
https://orangeglo.github.io/everdrive-gba-editor/
GNU General Public License v3.0
12 stars 1 forks source link

Blue screen on boot on original hardware #4

Closed brettinman closed 9 months ago

brettinman commented 9 months ago

Hi, found this great project after stalking the other Gameboy work you've done.

I tried this out and hit a weird issue I can't explain - on my original motherboard (but IPS display) GBA, using this palette, the GBA boots with the Nintendo logo but is then replaced with a solid blue screen. The shade doesn't look like any of the blues I have defined in the palette, and with the original firmware I still see a quick flash of that blue during the boot sequence, so I think the boot process may be getting stuck with the patched firmware.

The weird part is, it works fine on my Analogue Pocket. No issues, boots fine, colors are as designed. Furthermore, if I restore the original GBAOS.gba file onto the Everdrive, it still won't boot on the original hardware, but if I boot it on the Analogue Pocket AND start a game, then I can take the Everdrive and place it in the GBA and it's back to normal.

I'm using an Everdrive GBA Mini purchased a few months ago, running firmware 1.16. Patch is done using the romhacking.net tool.

epbarger commented 9 months ago

Hey thanks for reaching out! To be honest this sounds more like a hardware issue with your cart to me. Sometimes carts can fail in one system but not others due to subtle amounts of pressure on the PCB in the cart slots. I know early batches of the gba everdrive mini had issues, my original one was DOA, though I'd get a solid red screen, not blue. I think you're right that the blue screen is part of the boot up process.

How reliable can you reproduce the issue? Have you ever seen the issue with the unpatched rom on the IPS GBA? If you insert and boot the cart say like 5 times, does it always work? What if you switch to the patched rom and do the same thing? I'm a little skeptical that the patch could cause issues, especially the process you describe with swapping to the analogue pocket and then back to the GBA... but I suppose it's possible!

I'll try to reproduce this when I have some time, I have a analogue pocket and modded GBA I can try.

brettinman commented 9 months ago

Welp, my GBA is trying to make me look like an idiot. I went through the whole process two times before filing the issue. A few days later - I tried another palette and it works fine. Went back to the original palette. Also works fine.

Apologies for the noise and thank you for the response.

epbarger commented 9 months ago

Weird! Glad it's all working again for ya