Super Metroid cartridge save issues.

I have a copy of Super Metroid that has problems with saving. I have replaced the battery with a brand new one and the problem persists, I replaced the new battery with one taken from another SNES game cartridge that was still outputting 3V with the same result.
I have tried it in several consoles and it makes no difference, it might hold the save for a while but then when I come to play a while later it does not load on the first attempt and then when it does load the saves are gone.
Could this be a bad SRAM chip?

 

Most likely it's the SRAM - I've also seen similar problems caused by a bad MAD-1

 

Thanks. I am pleased to get a reply from the great TriMesh. Do you know of the cheapest/most available donor that contains MAD-1 and 64K SRAM? Most probably a sports game?

 

Anything with a xx3M board in it will work - you could try something like NBA 95/96, NHL 96/97, FIFA 96 - they should all be OK.

 

My copy is the BA3M-01 PCB. I have bought a cheap copy of Kamaitachi No Yoru which uses the BA3M-10 PCB, with the intention of just swapping over the ROM chips. There are versions of Super Metroid that use this board, so I assume that this would work?

 

Yeah, that should work fine. The general rule of these things is that higher dash numbers are compatible with lower ones, but not necessarily the other way around. I was assuming you were going to be swapping the RAM and MAD-1, since that's less soldering

 

It's also assuming there's not an issue with the original pcb.

Swapping rom is pretty much guaranteed to work, as long as the roms are fine.

 

I did originally intend to swap the RAM and MAD-1, but the PCB of my BA3M-01 is that strange grainy substrate material and the smooth stuff just seems better quality.

 

I would just swap the two mask roms on the donor cart for starters which is what you are intending to do anyway.

 

Yeah, but it also reduces the number of games you can use as parts donors - I have a box of old Japanese sports games (which I think I got for 100 yen each at Hard Off), and I try to use those for parts whenever possible.

 

I swapped over the Super Metroid ROM chips to the donor and it is saving fine now.
It was harder to remove the chips from the BA3M-01 as it has double side soldering, the BA3M-10 donor is single side soldered and seems like a better quality PCB.
The BA3M-01 board just seems inferior quality, the gold fingers (just learned of that term!) are much too shiny.