Alright, so I'm a bit confused here.  

Every time I play my primary copy of Zelda on my toaster, it plays fine until I enter a dungeon.  The screen goes black, I can see my hearts, rupees, etc, but it never transfers to the dungeon screen.  Just a bunch of blackness.  Happens with any dungeon I go into, but the rest of the game is fine.  What's going on?

Is it still "playable", like can you hear anything while in the dungeon? Whatever is triggering the dungeon parts of the game is messed up somehow.

maybe you need to get the lamp / torch =)

sounds like a bad sector of the game

Nope, it's frozen. Can't pause or anything. You know how normally it goes to black, then the screen "opens" to show the dungeon, from the sides? It's like that, but it stays black instead of revealing the dungeon and letting me play. Only does this for underworld sections, as I said. Caves are fine. So I'm guessing it has something to do with that scrolling animation. It seems to be hanging up there; there's no music playing.

If you have a powerpak and want a "WRAM Erasing" tool, I'll make one for you to just wipe all the data and maybe that'll fix it. But it doesn't sound like that, just sounds like something is going wonky on the program side somehow.

I might of misread but it sounds like he's using a regular retail cart and not a powerpak.


May be a faulty connection between the cart pins and the console? Like it's trying to access something and can't so it fails and locks up. Have you checked the 72 pin connector or looked at the game pcb? I'd start there.

the game is dirty
the nes is dirty
the game rom is bad.

since it fails consistently, I would lean towards option 3. all the dungeons are actually part of the same map, so if the game can't load that map, any dungeon would fail. I had a river city ransom cart like this- it would flake out at the exact same spot in the intro text every time. I dumped the oem rom to verify it was bad, and replaced it with an eprom, and it's fine now.

The game had worked on this cart previously (just a few days ago). I deleted my account and tried another one; same issue. I don't know enough about the board hardware to know if it could be an issue of not reading one of the contacts, but I suppose it's possible. I'll need to wait until I get a bit to take it apart. Until then I'll use a different cart. I was guessing it to be option 3 as well.

Taco, I mean wiping the RAM of a real cart, not a powerpak as I'd say just get a new save file. I know he isn't on a powerpak, but more than likely that's his best chance of being able to run the program I make to do such things.