I just completed my first repro cart, I took a famicom "Mother" cart and followed instructions to replace the rom chips with the eproms I had bought online. The game boots up just fine and will get all the way to the first battle with the lamp and then restart. it also will restart if you hold A or select prior to the first battle or attempt to do anything other than walk around the house.
Does anyone have any suggestions what might be causing this?
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Well if the game its self just stops, check the ROM soldering, triple check every connector and for each one for some stray solder. If it's the graphics, check the graphics chips' soldering. Also maybe try re-burning them if they are eraseable EPROMs.....Bad burns happen. One wishy washy bit....it's all you need.
Thats all I can think of :/
I heard there was some kind of copy protection in the game, so if that's the case you'll want to be sure you've got the right version of the PRG-ROM too.
By the way, you don't need to bend pins out like that; you can cut traces on the board with a sharp knife (check with multimeter to be sure you've cut it). If you do this close to a solder pad that the line connects to, you can later undo the cut very easily by scratching the green coating off the cut line, then bridging a little bit of solder from the solder pad to the exposed line. If done well, it's hard to tell that the line was ever cut. I've done this when experimenting with different devcart wirings, and it's allowed lots of crazy experiments without leaving a mess behind when I restore it to the way it was (I've even done this on my NES board, ack).
I just figured it out. I'd connected pins 16 and 24 and thought I was supposed to lift both, but I was supposed to solder pin 16 to its hole. I solder a jumper to connect it back to the hole and now it works perfectly. Thanks for all the suggestions though!
The copy protection only applies to people modifying the contents of the game. It only came up because people hacked the game to make it compatible with Nesticle. Copy protection failing would show the infamous "Illegal Screen", not crash the game.