A couple of years ago I made the mistake of trying to put a replacement battery into a friend's Pokemon Sapphire cart rendering it non-bootable. All GBA's recognize that it is indeed a GBA game but refuse to boot past the splash screen. I'm guessing by the layout of where the battery was that the mask rom was damaged by the battery pressing on the mask rom known as MX23L12806-12C manufactured by Macronix (I can't find a datasheet). I was curious if anyone knew a pin for pin compatible piece of flash I could program and solder in place to revive the cart. Mainly wish to do this to be able to use their save games again.
Never heard of an ic being damaged by such a thing, what happens with the battery removed? Battery is only for the rtc, right?
Solely for the RTC. Saves are stored in some non-volatile fashion though I'm not 100% certain about what type of chip it is given the markings on it aren't enough to identify it. Either the IC is damaged or some part of the PCB is, either way it gets detected as a GBA game, goes through the boot-up animation and drops to the white intermission screen. The GBA itself is quite fine. Worst case I suppose I could purchase a second Pokemon Sapphire cart and move the TSOP save chip (someone suggested it was FRAM?) from the old cart to the new. Isn't terribly urgent and is mainly for kicks and knowledge building at this point.
The cart has some damage then if it's the white screen. Try hooking it up to an action replay and save the data off it?
