Advice Needed, AR+4M Not Working

[videogameoverdose]

I have a Action Replay Plus 4 cart (Saturn) that doesn't work any more.
Can the "NES blinking light" problem, loss of contact be the problem?
or could there be some thing in side the cart that went south?

I'm miss playing my imports.

[Damaramu]

I've got one that died too, around '99. For no good reason.

I hear they're prone to just dying. Nothing you can do except buy a new one, if you can find them. x_x

[Logicdustbin]

I have heard that the 'after market' carts did widen the slot and cause the "NES blinking" issue.


I have no facts to back this up, but I'm sure I read that info here on this forum...

[Damaramu]

Well, ignore what I said about my Action Replay Plus. I decided to pop it into my Saturn and......

It fucking works!!!!

After 5 years of thinking the cart was dead, I find out the sucker still works!!! Woohooo!!!

It still had my Albert Odyssey (started that game in '97, played it on and off until 2001 when my Saturn's battery died and my cart stopped functioning) and my Shining The Holy Ark saves (also started in '97).

Oh yeah. I'm a happy camper.

[lakeflaccid]

I'm thinking I read somewhere that there seems to be some kinda connection between having a good battery in the Saturn and the cart slot working.

If I remember correctly, there was someone having problems with a Saturn Gameshark, and the only way it decided to work was replacing the battery in the Saturn.

Also, just for the record, it seems weird to me that the battery would have anything to do with the cartridge port on the Saturn, but it's worth a shot, I suppose. CR2032's are still cheaper than 4-in-1 carts.

[videogameoverdose]

Thanks for the tips.
Going to get a 2032 to see.
I'd hate to lose all the info stored in both memories, I used the AR4M+ as a back up memory.

I can only hope.

[videogameoverdose]

Thank you to everyone who suggested the CR2032 replacement .
Bought one, installed it, Works Fine!

[M15fit]

Ive had mine die a few times. I do have a few discs though for flashing most of the ar carts for the saturn. The disc i use is says ar4plus on it, its a copy so you need to swap or have a chip.

My point being, these carts are most of the time fixable

[fahlim003]

Ive had mine die a few times. I do have a few discs though for flashing most of the ar carts for the saturn. The disc i use is says ar4plus on it, its a copy so you need to swap or have a chip.

My point being, these carts are most of the time fixable

Can someone point me in the direction of a disc like this user speaks of? With the ability to access the ARP.

I have the old ARP with the connector for the COMMS card, and it is also one where it does not have glitches for Vampire Savior, etc..

I've had this cartridge since 2005 and until today never had any issues. However, this evening I booted up and tried to copy data from the internal memory over to the cartridge. I copied two files over to the previously empty ARP then pressed B to exit the memory manager and return to the Start Game / Start game with cheats option screen. The problem occurred here. When I selected Start game without cheats the ARP and system froze up. I reset the Saturn and what happened? The Saturn could no longer detect the ARP, or so I thought. After testing this over 4 different Saturns I came to the conclusion was not in the the fault of the cartridge slot or the systems in general. I made one last attempt in testing my official Sega save and RAM cartridges for detection on the various systems. I tried the official 4MB RAM expansion on a white NTSC-J system with Vampire Savior. It booted fine. Then I swapped the RAM cart for the ARP. Again, the ARP boot-up menu was bypassed but the Saturn was able to detect the expansion memory of the ARP, meaning it's not totally useless or kaput.

I figure if I have such a utility disc that can flash or even format the ARP independent of the ARP itself I can ressurect my cartridge. Otherwise it's up in the air.

EDIT: I used Rockin' B's Save Game Manager w/ ARP Flash to reset the ARP's bios. It did the trick and now my cartridge is working fine again.

[Az]

and it is also one where it does not have glitches for Vampire Savior, etc..

I need help on this one.

I have an older Saturn that the cart port is pretty much shot. Once you make the connection it works fine, but anytime you remove a cart and put a new one in you have to keep reinserting/removing the cart to get the machine to recognize it. I'm talking 10-20 minutes of NES cart-style blowing and praying. I've cleaned the port a dozen times and it does it with pretty much any cart, so I'm sure it's the connector port being the problem, and has been for years now.

That being said, once you get a cart to work you had better get your time and enjoyment out of it, because it's such a hassle to put another in. Swapping between RAM backup carts, ROM carts, official RAM carts, and the PAR is a bitch.

I've got one of the first-gen Pro Action Replay 4Mb carts, bought from Tronix years ago. This was when SF VS X-Men was the only 4M game, and it even glitches a bit with it. SNK's 1M games work, but usually the 2nd player sprite is a bunch of garbled pixles.

Whenever Vampire Savior first came out these carts didn't work correctly on them. For those that didn't want to rebuy the redesigned PAR that worked with VS, there was some soldering trick you could do on the cart PCB to get it to work.

Does anyone still have documentation on this mod?

Did this mod work with the other 4M games beyond Vampire Savior?

[thunderkid]

Here you go. Its a pretty easy mod...

http://www.shinforce.com/saturn/info...4MBRAM-mod.htm