I just grabbed Zelda: Link's Awakening for $10 over at Gamestop, & upon slapping it into my GBA SP (even after polishing the cart's connectors), I'm getting no background after the title screen. I get the intro, the titlescreen, then once I press start it's only sprites.
Anyone know what the problem could be?
Try erasing alll saves! This happened to me at a couple gamestops across the country. What state did you get it in?
Worked. I'm curious, where in SRAM would there be any data that affects the background tiles &/or display?
Only thing I can think of is that the game blindly loads FF40 (LCDC) with data from SRAM. Which is stupid and doesn't make sense.
The game probably doesn't fully validate the save game data. It might claim to have 100 hearts and cause the heart-drawing routine to corrupt other things, or similar. This must have always been a worry on those battery-RAM cartridges, that the data would become corrupt in a way that rendered the cartridge unusable until it were physically opened and the battery removed for a while. I imagine checksums were there for this reason, rather than preventing cheating.
blargg wrote:
The game probably doesn't fully validate the save game data.
But would it be possible to buffer-overflow the saved game loader and start executing homebrew code from SRAM, like in the Xbox and PSP softmods?
With a Game Genie, sure (it's how my no-mod Game Boy devcart works). I'll have to investigate Link's Awakening, because it'd be nice to have it run my loader without a Game Genie patch code.