Yoshi's Island: Garbled Mess

[Daria]

I've had some trouble cohersing my copy of Yoshi's Island SNES to play properly. Last night it took a few system restarts to start up the game, when it finally did play the system went black soon after the introduction. Restart plays fine, I beat the first three worlds and turned it off for the night. Or so I thought. Turned off the tv but accidently left the system running. Go to play it again tonight and the game simply won't play at all.

I tried cleaning the cartridge, but it's clean, practically brand new. I tried cleaning the SNES, even switching systems but the game still won't play. Now the only thing I can get the game to do is load up a glitchy screen.

Opened up the cartridge and I think I may have found the problem. Looks like it's missing a metal clip that grounds the game. My question is, does this sound like the solution? Can I replace the clip? Or have I fried my cartridge?

Clips.

Grounding Contacts

[Daria]

Maybe that's not it... Super Mario RPG only has one clip as well and that game plays just fine. :/

[SkiDragon]

Yeah, I would imagine one ground connection would be all that was needed. You might even be able to get away with none, but I wouldn't try it. If you want to, borrow a contact from another game and see if this game works with both contacts. Its not the SNES, right?

[Daria]

Yeah, I would imagine one ground connection would be all that was needed. You might even be able to get away with none, but I wouldn't try it. If you want to, borrow a contact from another game and see if this game works with both contacts. Its not the SNES, right?

Nope I tried both my SNES model 2's and different games. Yoshi's Island has the same problem on both systems and the other games play fine.

Does anyone know how to fix a cartridge once you've gotten past the initial "cleaning"?

[Bratwurst]

Coincidentally enough I have gone through a few Yoshi's Island carts and generally they took a while to get working initially.

In cleaning the SNES, did you pay attention to the area that those two distinct slabs of the cartridge card edge connect into? Most other SNES games do not use them. My personal suspicion is that the lack of use of these extra areas of the cartridge port leads to them getting dirtier than usual- insertion and removal of a card edge tends to have a self cleaning effect.

Only other option I'd figure would be to thoroughly check the traces of the circuitboard and pins of each chip to make sure there wasn't a broken connection. They're rare, but I have found a few carts with cold solder joints and loose tracework.

[omnedon]

I've seen three Yoshi's island carts that needed solder joints reflowed on eeproms.

[Daria]

How would I recognize a cold solder join?

[chaoticjelly]

How would I recognize a cold solder join?

Trace a leg of the chip I guess, use a multimeter to test continuity between the points.. no join maybe a dry solder joint..

Or of course you could carefully, carefully reheat/add to each leg.. thats probably what I'd do in your shoes.. not recommended for soldering newbs though. Use a small bit.

[MrKitt]

to adress this issue there is a kinda fucked up copy protect built into yoshi's island that cause the game to reset /hang on some consoles (also known as rgb protection) easy whay to fix it is to replace your AC adaptor with a DC one (might need some internal bypassing of the geizercirquit) this will solve the problem.

if you experience garbagled gfx its probably a bad sold on one of the rom chips adress or datalines. (quick fix resolder them all)