recently, i've had a hankering for some pokémon. i popped in my copy of alpha sapphire, launched the game,
and then it crashed.
kinda weird, but whatever, let's try again.
and then it crashed.
my 3ds is modded, so i had to wonder if i had somehow screwed that up and made the game unplayable. i tried some other games, and they ran just fine, as far as i could tell—whatever the problem was, it was specific to alpha sapphire.
i was aware that oras carts are known to go bad, but that's believed to only affect european copies, which mine is not.
if my 3ds were not modded, this would probably have been the anticlimactic conclusion to this story: my console just does not like this game, for some reason.
but fortunately, i had free access to the device i ostensibly owned, and could actually deal with the problem.
when i complained about this on mastodon, i got a helpful tip: i could use the homebrew software GodMode9, which provides filesystem access to the whole console, to hash the ROM directly from the cartridge. i could then compare that to what it should be and see if it matches.
not only did the hash not match, it wasn't even consistent between the several times i ran it! this seems to be consistent with the theory that the issue is connections with the ROM chip loosening (interestingly, the faulty cart in this video is also non-european)
on a vanilla console, this would have been the end of the road again. i could have bought a replacement copy for nearly the same price as my original defective one and waited for shipping, with no guarantee that it wouldn't also have this problem, but then i couldn't copy over my save file.
you can copy save files from a cart to the e-shop version, but, uh, nintendo closed that. you can't buy it anymore.
homebrew solves this perfectly fine, and without the cost of time or money: i could just install the game and copy the save file across. (fortunately, reading it off the cart still works!)
it's really nice how easy it is to do simple things when devices you own actually permit you to do stuff with them.
