N64 Smash Bros Not Saving

I just bought a cartridge of smash bros for the 64 and it doesn't save. It turns on and works properly but when I turn off the console I lose my save progress. Sometimes if I turn the console off and on quickly the save stays but not when its been off for an extended period.

After doing some research I thought it might be the battery that died. I replaced the battery but I still have the issue. I've seen online that it could be a bad save chip and that I could take one from another game that uses SRAM. Is this wise? I'm also not sure which chip is the save chip on pcb. Any help you can give would be appreciated.

 

Does the capacitor look ok?
What voltage is the cell at?

 

It's that sharp ram ic gone.

 

Reflow the chip and check for bad traces. It's unlikely the sram chip is dead, but possible.

 

The battery is new and reading at 3.5 V. The capacitor looks to be fine too.

Sorry, but I'm a complete noob when it comes to this stuff. By reflow do you mean use a multimeter and check to see if the connections are all working properly?

 

I took a multimeter and tested all the connections that I could see between the pins and chips and I did not find any that seemed to be broken. I have no idea where to go from here. Any suggestions?

 

can you take a nice clean photo of both sides of the pcb?

 

I recently had a guy buy a cheap sports game off me for the SRAM chip. Evidently, he was experiencing the same kind of problem and a swap of the SRAM chip solved it.

So, while swapping out the SRAM chip might be over your head, it's very possible that this is the problem. Like the above says...it's the Sharp chip.

 

Reflow means to reheat the solder on the legs.

 

use flux

 

Hopefully these image are clear enough. To my untrained eye it seems that everything looks good enough.

I've seen that a lot of people use either 1080 or ken griffey as another game to take the SRAM from. Is one of these better than the other? Or is there a game that's better to use other than these two? A friend of mine is good at doing this type of stuff so he should be able to swap it no problem.

Thanks for all the responses!

 

Why are you patching ground plane? Dude, not to seem harsh but you might be in over your head. You have a very high chance of destroying the traces on the sram if you try to remove it without proper equipment. (like 80 percent chance of failure) @APE You might want to chime in with tips.

 

By patching the ground plane do you mean the solder that's in the bottom corner next to the ROM? I just bought this game on ebay and that was already there.

I'm definitely in over my head . My friend works on circuit boards all the time though so he should be able to handle it. Since it doesn't save data I'm looking at it in a way that if the SRAM traces get destroyed then I'm breaking an already broken game. Smash Bros without Captain Falcon unlocked just ain't right.

 

Oh I got nervous when I saw that the ground plane was being patched. The ground is connected In many places so its generally doesn't need a patch. Hopefully your friend has a desoldering iron, because speaking from experience braid and flux is a pain. Also much of Nintendo's boards use a solder with a high melting point. Best of luck getting it repaired.