Pokemon Gold won't work

My pokemon gold will not work for some reason. I found it last year and when I tried playing it, it would freeze and i'd have to restart it. Well after I changed the battery, it stopped working completely. I tested it out around May again and I got the same thing. Today after replacing the battery in my recently found pokemon silver, my dad decided to try and solder the battery on the prongs. I got the game boy screen, but it still won't start the game. Any way I can fix it or is my gold done for good?

 

Try getting a replacement battery with the the tabs, but if the battery died the cart should work regardless it just won't save.

I'm guessing you've cleaned the cart and the gameboy?

 

I haven't cleaned the game boy, but the cart is clean.

 

It could be the connectors, have you tried to reflow the chips on the cart?

 

I haven't because I didn't know I could do that. How would I do that?

 

Flux and reflow each leg of the 2 chips that are circled in red with your soldering iron. Should boot right up. Good luck!

 

I will try it this weekend. Thanks!

 

Okay turns out my dad doesn't know how to flux and reflow a game cartridge. If it was a tv or something else, then he would know how to do it. How would we flux and reflow the chips?

 

Get a soldering iron with a chisel (or other fine point tip), and some soldering flux. Apply flux to the pins of the chip and merely heat up each leg, this is reflowing the solder. You may have to add a -very- small amount of additional solder but try without it first.

 

Thank you!

 

I've been seeing this happen more and more lately, it would be wonderful if someone with a lab would analyze a few cartridges and figure out what's going on in general. I'd wager it could be several things ranked from most likely to lesser likely:

1) Connector corrosion
2) Trace damage (could be almost anywhere though)
3) IC damage (could be any of them

Probably some other stuff I'm not considering. I've also seen games like Super Mario RPG boot and freeze or display corruption then freeze with no amount of solder reflowing doing any good on it's own which suggests an issue with trace damage or IC damage. Mask roms (and most IC packages in general) are pretty hearty and won't see any damage unless you've gone well beyond their operation range (like cooking it in an oven or dipping it into liquid Nitrogen). Hypothetically they can last forever pending the aforementioned doesn't occur.

There is always damage caused by dropping it. Problem is with a cartridge that won't boot it can be a number of possible traces and checking every trace is a bitch. I'm not aware of any methods for quickly determining problems with cartridges either beyond systematic testing.

 

If I'm not mistaken, the battery is just for the internal clock, for the day/night cycle.

I know in Sapphire it'll play ok after the battery dies.

 

Battery is for the save. The two taped prongs at the top left is for the time.