Troubleshooting

Supercards are of questionable quality and are known to have some issues and suffer from known hardware issues. Please ensure you test your cart (i.e. battery is healthy) and are aware of its limitations.

Known issues

This is a non-exhaustive list of known issues that might not have a fix:

• General slowness while playing for some games. See the explanation below
• Non-working games: ie. NES Classics / Famicom Mini collection.
• Gameboy/Color game issues: These games use an emulator, see the full explanation.
• The In-game menu doesn’t work properly or is not available for some games. This is unfortunately the case for some games.

Some issues can be fixed or improved on a game-by-game basis, however do not file bugs for known issues. There’s usually an open bug for it already.

ROM issues

Boot issues (white/black screen)

Supercard has slow memory and requires certain patches to work with this memory type. If these patches are not correctly generated, the game will most likely crash with a white or black screen, usually during boot.

Ensure you are using the correct patches (for commercial games use the Built-in database). The patches are auto-generated, so it is possible that they contain bugs.

Slowness while playing

Since Supercard has a slow cart memory, some games designed for faster carts might suffer from slowness. This cannot usually be fixed. However some games can suffer from additional slowdowns when using the In-game menu. You can try disabling it and checking if this improves the game speed.

Corrupted ROMs and random glitches

SuperFW does not validate ROM checksums (nor SD card checksums) when loading files from the SD card. This is done on purpose, since doing so would be painfully slow. In some cases the loaded ROM could not work, have glitches, etc. If this only happens occasionally it might be that your cart is not properly inserted, or the slot is dirty. It can also be due to low-quality SD cards, check if another card works better. Some GBA models are known to have issues even with the original firmware (usually the SP or NDS devices work better).

Game boy / Color ROM issues

Using a GBA cartridge it is not possible to play GB/C games. SuperFW uses an emulator (jagoombacolor) to play these games. Any issues with particular games are most likely an emulator issue. You can try using a better emulator or purchase a Gameboy/Color cartridge (only works on GBA, won’t work in NDS).

Save game issues

There are several issues that can affect your ability to save games. Ensure you check which kind of saving type you are using before troubleshooting.

Bad cart battery

If you use SRAM games (or SRAM saving type in general) you might need to have a working battery. This is necessary if you save on reboot.

You can verify your battery in the Tools menu and running a battery test. Run the test and follow the instructions.

If your battery is dead, you won’t be able to save on reboot. You can instead use Direct Saving with games that allow it. For SRAM games you can select Manual as saving method and then use the In-game menu to manually save the game while playing.

Corrupted save game

Some games might complain about corrupted games while loading. This could be caused by a corrupted save (that is, saving corrupted your game for some reason) or due to an issue loading the save game. You can test whether your save file is corrupt by loading it in your PC and using an emulator.

Make sure that you select the Load option in the Savegame load option in the Savegame options menu, when loading a game. If the option is not available, it means that SuperFW was not able to find a save game (.sav file). Ensure that the file is in the right directory (can be configured in the Settings menu).

If your save games are corrupted, you will need to identify why that happens. If you use Direct Saving it is possible that your SD card is not having a good time, that happens with low quality or older cards. Please test another card to ensure this is not a bad card.

Corrupted SRAM save games can happen for many reasons: bad cart battery (see above), a corrupted SRAM chip (you can check yours in the Tools menu), etc.

SD card issues

Some SD cards are known to cause issues, usually cards of questionable quality. It is also common to encounter issues related to filesystem corruption and format. We encourage users to back up their savegames and other valuable files periodically, since SD card corruption happens unfortunately more frequently than with hard drives.

Boot error codes

During boot the SD card partition will be mounted and accessed. If this process fails an error will be displayed.

Fatal SD card init err

Cannot mount FATfs

Cannot load BOOT.NDS