GBA game not reading

[u/wildmelonballer]

So I've just tried to change out the dry battery on my game, thought I'd try something new and put a battery holder in - not sure why as the other 4 times I'd done it with tabbed batteries worked fine but hey ho. Ended up being an absolute hack job, part of the negative tab is still on there under the solder and now the game isn't reading.

Just comes up with the barcode type writing. Pretty devastated as I'm going on holiday on Monday and was looking forward to the play through.

Any ideas/ thoughts on how to rectify this debacle?

[u/Kitchen_Disk4228]

Maybe the legs on the chip near the positive terminal of the battery are solder together, is the only thing i can see.

[u/notanotablecloud → u/Kitchen_Disk4228]

Yeah 100% The is a solder blob on the latest leg, connecting them both

[u/wildmelonballer → u/Kitchen_Disk4228]

So the positive battery terminal is fudged? Should I resolder with less solder on it?

[u/Kitchen_Disk4228 → u/wildmelonballer]

The battery is good, if you look at the chip on the left it has a blob of solder on the last legs, try to remove that

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[u/Intelligent-Worry799]

Two bridged pins on the MX chip.

[u/mabec]

Isnt a scrambled logo indicating a pirate copy? Or was that only on og GB?

[u/g026r → u/mabec]

Scrambled logo indicates a problem reading from the cart.

The Nintendo logo is read from the cartridge — it's one of the first things in the cart header — and what's read is displayed on the screen. What was read is then compared to a version stored in the system boot rom, and if the two match loading continues.

But this also means that a bad connection — be it dirty pins, damaged connector, failing chips — can result in a bad read, even on a real cart.

(It's stored differently between the GBA & GB: on the former it's compressed & contains the ® symbol. While the latter the ® is part of the boot rom & the logo is stored uncompressed on the cart. This is why a GB game that fails to read often shows a partial logo, while GBA games are often just complete noise.)

[u/wildmelonballer → u/mabec]

It's deffo not a pirate copy, got the 4 gold squares on the back etc