Bstar

I'm a BMX fiend, I have achieved higher scores than anyone I've seen documented. It's my goto usually. Hard driving' and its 3fps is rough.

Got it. I'm not sure I want to compromise portability... since upgrading to the Bennvenn screen I get really impressive battery life with some cheapish (powerowl) NIMH batteries. I like the idea of stuffing a LIION battery in the battery compartment with a way to directly charge it, but I have not done any research on doing that with a lynx. I've seen a few Game Gear projects that do this and figured I might be able to do something similar with the lynx. It's hard to put so much effort into modding this device when one of my favorite games doesn't work... why couldn't Hard Drivin' be the one that crashes ?

dupe

Hmm, so you have to be wired now? Are you able to fit a lithium ion battery in the case?

I did not mean to give the impression that I'm just swapping out chips at random with no regard for logical repairing practices. Problem is that these devices work perfectly fine except for these bizarre crashes- not the easiest thing to debug. That's not something a multimeter can find. The first thing I would do on any computer or device is replace the memory. I've tried every possible way to run diagnostics on the system that could bring me closer to solving this issue, but nothing has helped. It seemed reasonable that swapping out the memory chips with known good ones would at least remove that variable from the equation. Obviously the shielding problem was unexpected, but it literally too me 5 minutes to get those chips out of my dead Lynx1 (which never did exhibit this problem). Thanks for the link, I'm definitely going to look into the USB cord mod. My Lynx 2 has the most unstable power cord ever, you breathe on it wrong and it reboots the device. Getting that addressed would be a huge bonus.

On a side note, I think I might order a cap replacement kit since I have everything apart. At least I'll get something useful done.

Ahh, wish I saw the rest of this thread on Friday, lol. Anyway, I have a dead Lynx 1, so desoldering the 2 ram chips was trivial. Problem I'm having now is getting the shielding off my Lynx II and I'm pretty close to giving up on it. Definitely feel like I might damage things at this point. Karri, you are much more knowledgeable on this than I am, but I thought replacing the ram would be a good start. Do you think transplanting the Suzy chip is a better bet (can a Lynx 1 Suzy be transported to a Lynx II)? I'm not finding a good photo diagram that shows which chip that is, but I'm assuming it's one of the ones that will be ridiculously hard to solder. I can reflow the chips with the small contacts, but I don't have the right equipment to do a transplant.

Really happy I was able to snag a copy, I always find out about these releases way after the fact. This seems like the perfect kind of game for the lynx, can't wait to play.

I'm going to transfer my memory chips from my lynx 1, hopefully this weekend. I'll report on how that turns out. The memory is different, but exact same specs it seems.

I think it's a ram issue. I had my first random crash playing Toki (near the end of the second level in the water). The Diagnostics rom does not seem to test memory addresses so I'd really like to find a utility that does that. That still doesn't explain the incredible coincidence you and I are having, but I can't think of anything other than memory that could cause this. I have a dead Lynx 1... if that has the same memory as my Lynx 2 and is something I can transfer, I might try that.

I'm going to see if I can get the debug env going this weekend and see if I can figure anything out. Definitely a bit out of my comfort zone programming-wise, but I might be able to make a little progress.

Just want to chime in and say that I have a similar issue as OldAtAtari, but with California Games. I posted a Youtube video of the problem: Very strange that this only happens with this one game (original cart and romcarts). All other games are fine. I'm going to look into these programming resources as well and see if I can make any progress that benefits us both. I'm a developer myself, but primarily in cloud architectures, so not so applicable here.

That's an interesting idea. I have a similar problem with California Games... I can't get by the spinning license plate without the game freezing. I didn't think of trying a rom hack. It seems you and I are both having an issue on the same screen (the animated screen after the initial graphic)- in my case Zarlor Mercenary works fine. I need to look at some of the programming resources and see what the SDK imposes as these two loading screens seem to be common on all commercial Lynx games. It might not be possible to jump straight to the interactive screen as the problematic screen might be responsible for loading data. If nothing special is happing there, we might be able to bypass. Handy emulator would speed up the process. So strange we are experiencing this... I could see it being a romcart issue, but I'm also seeing the problem with my original cart. It has to be a hardware glitch that has manifested over time (my unit used to play California Games just fine).

When I fire up California Games on my Lynx II, the game freezes when I exit the rotating license plate screen. The music continues to play, but all functionality is frozen. To my knowledge, this only happens with California Games... I've not experienced any other crashes on other titles. This issue happens regardless of whether I use my original California Games cart or one of my rom carts. I have the BennVenn screen installed, but this issue has existed long before I installed the new screen. I have never taken this Lynx apart (going back to my childhood) prior to the screen replacement. Curious if anyone has some ideas on what might be the issue here. This is one of the most bizarre issues I've ever seen with retro hardware. Youtube link of issue

I've started replacing the capacitors. It's still not starting, but I've only gotten through about a third of them so far.