Ever since I performed the resistor fix on my PowerPak, I've had intermittent card read errors and game crashes. My original fix looked like this, since I wasn't very confident in my ability to solder resistors directly between the resistor array and edge connector. I updated the mod slightly a few months back, using a shorter section of floppy cable instead of individual wires, but the card errors and crashes only became more frequent and severe. I was at the end of my rope, ready to send the thing back to bunnyboy, until I decided to try my hand at soldering the resistors directly to the edge connector, out of sheer curiosity. Lo and behold, the mod went off without a hitch, and the PowerPak is working almost flawlessly now--no card errors or crashes (aside from those caused by buggy mapper logic)!
So, now I'm curious--what was wrong with my previous fixes? They used the same resistors, connected to the same points, just with a longer circuit path. Could the wires have introduced interference, or perhaps slight timing problems due to their length? Why was I getting crashes when the original problem was only supposed to affect sprite DMA? I'm in no way an electronics expert, so some insight on this issue would be appreciated.
So, now I'm curious--what was wrong with my previous fixes? They used the same resistors, connected to the same points, just with a longer circuit path. Could the wires have introduced interference, or perhaps slight timing problems due to their length? Why was I getting crashes when the original problem was only supposed to affect sprite DMA? I'm in no way an electronics expert, so some insight on this issue would be appreciated.