The F-Zero cartridge: Return of the flakiness!

[sniffnoy]

So, last year Grant's F-Zero cartridge was always a bit flaky. Or more like it was just dirty. It had to be blown on every so often to get it to work, or maybe you just had to power-cycle the system a few times.

This year, amazingly, we seem to have had none of those problems. Until today. When we finally got the thing to start up, we noticed the title screen was wrong... actually entering the game, it was clear that data had been erased. Not our best times, thankfully, but all our GP race accomplishments, meaning we had only the first row of cars, and no Joker or X cup. Stranger still was that it remembered which cars we had beaten which cups with, just not that we had beaten them! Not the result of somebody hitting clear all data, obviously a hardware glitch.

So, we went, re-earned all the cars and tracks (though there's actually a code to unlock them instantly, but we wanted to reget the second title screen as well), and... the thing glitched up again, erased... well, I think it kept all the cars and tracks this time, but it erased a bunch of our best times, and overwrote others with 0s. (Those ones can be taken care of as you can erase the high scores for a specific track, but even then, it's still erased our times!) Who knows how much longer any of our times will last, or the cars and tracks, or how long until the thing fails entirely?

-Harry

Comments

[sniffnoy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, at this point, that probably makes the most sense; the question is who's going to pay for it. It's unlikely that we'll get the house to cover it; we can get them to cover controllers, but I don't know about actual games. Well, apparently we used to have a house copy of Smash, but that was Smash. It's Grant's cartridge, so he might buy a replacement; but if he doesn't want to bother, someone else with an N64 will have to pay for it, unless someone is generous enough to buy it and donate it to the house.