[Solidstate]

I own Flashboy number 18.

I’ve never used it until today (I bought it hoping that one day Virtual Bowling would be dumped and released, and that day has finally come).

But after waiting for over 10 years to play a game, I’ve fallen at the final hurdle. I can’t get the Flashboy to take the rom.

I tried numerous roms (padded and unpadded) on two different PCs – but they all fail writing. I haven’t got one to work yet. If I adjust the padding type they fail to write at different %s.

Anyone got any idea. I’m guessing that its faulty (but I really hope not).

• This topic was modified 16 years, 1 month ago by Solidstate.
• This topic was modified 16 years, 1 month ago by Solidstate.

are you using an usb hub? have you tried another cable? you are not using dev mode on the loader, right? which roms did you try? (only 2mb roms work)

Sorry to trouble you KR155E – problem solved.

I dug my third PC out of the loft (a machine I keep with a clean install of XP and nothing else) – it comes in useful for flashing DVD Drives etc.

This machine failed writes at 53%! I then tried the cart on my other PCs and they too then failed at 53% – weird.

I then tried to write an unpadded rom and it wrote all the way to 100% (but of course wouldn’t run). I then tried a padded rom again and it too went all the way to 100% and then booted and ran in the VB.

It was a weird problem (Perhaps a Format Cart option in the writer program would have cured it) – However I don’t care what it was now that everything works. Off to play now – thanks again for helping to fulfill a 10 year old wish of mine.

weird indeed! but i’m glad to hear that it’s working now! 🙂

Yeah, I just wanted to let you guys know that I had a similar problem. I have flashboy #5, I dug it out to play the new dumps and figured I would come here to get newer versions of the flashboy program and padder. Every single game I tried had write errors padded and unpadded. I even tried the different padding options and nothing worked. In the end I ended up using the programs that came on the disc and they both worked like a charm.

[akumie]

for me all the games works on the flashboy exept nesters funky bowling

• This reply was modified 16 years ago by akumie.

Hello =)
It was a long time i didn’t come here =)
I tried the last version of FlashBoy.exe and i had many writing errors. I mean, i couldn’t boot any game, ’cause it always failed in writing (Wario at 3%, many tries; other game could fail at various %, even “complet”).
So i’m still using the FlashBoy.exe (V2).

Can it be a batch issue ? (i own #98).

but anyway, many many thanks for all the great job from PVB team, KR155E and obviously Richard Hutchinson =)

I’m wrinting a little “howto” that i will publish on a French forum (and i already promoted the FlashBoy so you had orders 😉

And, as i am writing here, i had a few questions:
What are the specs of each padding mode ? I mean, what do they do exactly ?

I hope you’ll understand my frenchy english
So you soon !

hey!

yes, not all flashboys work fine with all loader versions. one of the two latest versions (20080428, 20081026) should always work, though.

from what i understand the padding options do the following:
1: moves the rom “footer” (which contains the header actually) to the end and fills the space between the rom and the rom footer with 0x00s (or was it 0xFFs?)
2: places the rom at the end of the new file, and fills the rest with zeroes
3: duplicates the whole rom once or twice, so the padded roms contains 2 or 4 times the unpadded rom

so, the first two options flash faster, because zeroes can be skipped when flashing.

will you post a link to that tutorial? 🙂

Thank you for explanations.
Here is a link to my howto:

http://www.metagames-eu.com/forums/les-tutoriaux-oldies/mini-guide-flashboy-107618.html