Originally posted by: Austin
There are a *ton* of issues with the original firmware, which is why when someone has a problem the first response will always be, "update your firmware." It's easy and takes literally seconds to do (although it looks like the OP will need to download the firmware and scoreboard software elsewhere and transfer it home via physical media).
For a little perspective, some of us had to update on Day 1 because we weren't even getting sound. It just is what it is--what matters is that fixes are and have always been there right from the beginning, and it's important users take the small amount of time to update it. Honestly, with the implementation of interpolation, there is literally zero reason to not update now.
That's not what I'm talking about, though. I'm talking about how things will be operating just fine, and then out of nowhere there's some glitchy issue that wasn't there before--on the same system, running the same firmware. If it was a pre-existing issue with the current firmware, the issue should have occurred immediately (such as the menu issue referenced above). Reloading the same, current firmware to correct that issue indicates it's some corruption of the firmware (or closely associated with the firmware) that's causing the issue, which shouldn't be a continuous issue.
Originally posted by: bunnyboy
All the config registers are in the NES address space, so when a game crashes or is glitchy from being dirty it can stomp over all the settings. The easy fix is just have those registers locked out when the menu system isn't running, or validate the range of settings (like don't allow graphics borders to cover the screen). Of course the fix will need a firmware update, so update firmware will still be the first thing to do
Ok, that makes some sense. If it's the settings getting corrupted, and not the actual firmware, shouldn't wiping the settings work to fix the non-bug issues, versus a full on restore? I can see restoring the firmware as a catch all troubleshooting method since it totally resets
everything, but it does seem a little extreme to me if a lot of the issues are just settings data getting borked and causing the firmware to act weird as a result of having bad values all over. I'm guessing restoring the firmware is done just to ensure that everything *does* get wiped, whereas borked settings could cause the existing firmware to act like it's zeroing settings values and restoring defaults but not actually doing so?