Hey Everyone,

They may be bad carts, but they may have been glitched.

The first run of Link's Awakening was buggy, you could 'screen jump' and go into areas that are off the map and/or non-existent. This could be harmless, but worst case people were reporting partially deleted/corrupted game data and complete wipes of the ROM.

You could also mess with the save data by turning off the system when you were deleting one of your save slots and people reported that this could delete the actual ROM as well.

You may have copies that had this done to it.

Hmm possible, but with the game saves erased both work perfectly. I don't think that the games ROMs have been damaged. (assuming you mean ROM as in the place where the game is actually stored, not the save data)

Wow, that's so weird! Now I understand how that Zelda TAS Video was done...

Building off Luke's post there I know of another A grade progression stopper bug in the game, notated by Nintendo in the day on the original run too where 1 in 10 carts were toast. I had one of them. I think it's the face shrine, been so long I forget, but it was a later one. Anyway one of the rooms the key never will drop, doesn't matter if you clear it, cheat on the room skip bug as you can't because of the type of room(direction needed to skip can't be done), and it will always chirp for a key and it won't drop. I never was able to finish the game until years later when I got the GBC title.

Corrupt save data is definitely the problem. I have around 10 cartridges that did the same thing, and disconnecting the batteries fixed them.
DX has the same problem, it happened to me on my last playthrough. I didn't do anything unusual before powering the Game Boy down for the last time.

I had the DX version as a kid, and I somehow managed to fuck it up to the point where my save was corrupted (I always started in Tal Tal Heights, regardless of where I saved, all my items were Roc's Feathers, My character was invisible unless you jump to see the shadow, and I lost all of my instruments).. I have no idea how that happened, and I don't remember glitching it at all. A similar thing happened with Pokemon Blue after about a week of completely abusing the missingno rare candy glitch.

... Just in case somebody reading this gets the wrong idea, it's impossible to wipe/erase/clear a Mask ROM. They are fabricated at the factory to permanently hold that specific data.

Very interesting thread I must say, never heard of being able to seriously bork the save data in a Link's Awakening cart. Is there a way to identify a copy to tell which revision it is?

Come to think of it, I probably have Link's Awakening DX...