Hey guys, i have a big problem. My N64 keeps freezing recently. I bought an Everdrive two weeks ago and everything run smoothly until last week. I upgraded the N64 with an expansion pack to play all the games supported by it and installed a new replacement thumbstick. As soon as i did this it seemed that all games requiring the expansion pack froze at some point or suddenly reset. Even in the Everdrive OS it reset the unit randomly. First i cleaned all connectors with pcb cleaner and tried again with no luck. Games like Perfect Dark or Majoras Mask still froze at random points. I thought maybe the expansion pack is faulty and i removed and it looked like it solved the problems. But after playing Conker BFD for a while the the screen froze in and only the bgm kept on playing. I already recognize that a game is going to fail because the grafics start to mess up or the sound stops playing. I had similar problems in the beginning but i could solve the problems by reformating the SD Card from FAT with 4k blocks to FAT with 32k blocks. Before that every game froze after a few minutes. Can it be that the SD Card is still formatted in a wrong way? If so how should a properly formatted SD Card look like? The Everdrive was working several days without any problems. Is it already broken in some way? It all started after inserting the expansion pack. At one point I thought the replacement thumbstick is causing problems but that seemed technically impossible to me so i left it in place. Also the N64 never failed on me before and it is a pretty robust piece of hardware so i assume the base unit is ok. Any suggestions how to test what is wrong with my setup? Is there some kind of diagnostic or stresstest cartridge? Regards and thanks in advance Gundamn
Have you tried running the N64 without the Everdrive? If you can, try the N64 with games (original cartridges, not the Everdrive) that require the expansion pak, and also remove the expansion pak and put back the jumper pack and test original games (that don't need the expansion pak, obviously) to what crashes and what works. The N64 definitely shouldn't be crashing, nor should any graphics ever get glitched, but I doubt it's a problem with the Everdrive (though more techy people than me might know otherwise). Can you try another N64? They are cheap enough that you might want to buy one anyway as a spare, and if you did you could test your Everdrive and original games on that N64 to see if it's your original N64 at fault. By the way, when you replaced the jumper pack with the expansion pak, you didn't somehow damage the connectors, did you? That might explain the problem. Other than that, I'd suggest you post on the official Everdrive forums, at; http://krikzz.com/forum/index.php Krikzz is the bloke who makes the Everdrives, so he'd know better than anyone what the problem might be. And as far as I know there's no diagnostic or stress-test type cartridge for the N64, though I might be wrong. I've never heard of one, though. And perhaps someone could write a program to test and stress test the N64, to be used with the Everdrive?
I'll try that. Thats a good idea. I will see if i find another one. The only thing i noticed is that the pak slightly bends in the opposite direction of the lever during replacement. I will try the things you mentioned and post the results afterwards.
