Shiny Ho-Oh
Well-Known Member
Recently purchased a Pokemon Gold cartridge for some nostalgia (last time I played gen II was ~17 years ago). Started a new game and loved it, played about 4 hours straight before I saved and turned the game off. Picked it up a few hours later and I get the error "the game file may be corrupted and cannot be played" or something like that. Boom, save file is gone. I was so angry putting in that time and then having the cartridge I just bought die on me. But I refused to give up.
Looked up some stuff and found out that if the internal battery dies then it can't hold a save file (might be general knowledge to you guys but this was new to me). And to make matters worse the internal clock is always running in these games and performs a "double drain" on the battery. Ordered some stuff online and successfully swapped out the old battery and soldered on a new one. Ta da! The game can now be saved and played normally. BUT, I quickly realized that the time was never changing. I'm not sure if the time was messed up when I got the cartridge or perhaps I messed up somewhere with the battery replacement? I thought this was another setback to my nostalgia trip, but I found that you can manually change the date & time with a code that you can generate. Minor inconvenience and annoying, but this gives me a chance to change the date & time for events and pokemon. Also lets you move a day so that the Time Capsule can be available (need to wait 1 day after you discover the time capsule).
I was a little annoyed, however it just hit me that if the time isn't working that means the oscillating crystal inside the cartridge is probably broken and thus not performing a "double drain" on the battery anymore. This would mean the Gold cartridge is only draining the battery while it's on, and should last for years and years longer than normal before dying again. Is this theory correct? Perhaps destroying that oscillating crystal and changing the time manually might be the new meta to make these games last longer haha.
Looked up some stuff and found out that if the internal battery dies then it can't hold a save file (might be general knowledge to you guys but this was new to me). And to make matters worse the internal clock is always running in these games and performs a "double drain" on the battery. Ordered some stuff online and successfully swapped out the old battery and soldered on a new one. Ta da! The game can now be saved and played normally. BUT, I quickly realized that the time was never changing. I'm not sure if the time was messed up when I got the cartridge or perhaps I messed up somewhere with the battery replacement? I thought this was another setback to my nostalgia trip, but I found that you can manually change the date & time with a code that you can generate. Minor inconvenience and annoying, but this gives me a chance to change the date & time for events and pokemon. Also lets you move a day so that the Time Capsule can be available (need to wait 1 day after you discover the time capsule).
I was a little annoyed, however it just hit me that if the time isn't working that means the oscillating crystal inside the cartridge is probably broken and thus not performing a "double drain" on the battery anymore. This would mean the Gold cartridge is only draining the battery while it's on, and should last for years and years longer than normal before dying again. Is this theory correct? Perhaps destroying that oscillating crystal and changing the time manually might be the new meta to make these games last longer haha.