Imported a copy of Ocarina of Time about 6 months ago from eBay US and it's sat at my dad's since then. Tried booting it up today and I just get a black screen. Obviously far too late to claim a return... is there anything I can do to fix it? I tried cleaning the contacts with isopropyl but no luck, and I don't really know what else to try.
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As an update to this thread, I've fixed the issue - but it was actually a much more interesting problem.
I own two versions of OoT - NTSC US v1.0 (gold cartridge) and v1.2 (grey). I was about to list my v1.2 in the Sales forum so I went to test it, and received exactly the same blank-screen behaviour as the v1.0 which I had assumed faulty. I knew this second cart had worked recently, so I was pretty confused.
I recently brought a 64DD back from Japan to add to my retro rig at home. With the DD plugged in, all games except F-Zero X play as normal. F-Zero will bring up an error message saying 'No Expansion Disk detected' if it's not present, but still allow you to play the base game. All my other cartridge games - US and Japanese - work entirely as normal and do not interface with the DD in any way (the light doesn't even come on). I figured all games that don't use the add-on simply aren't programmed to detect it. But that was the only thing that had changed in my setup, so as a long shot I figured I might as well try booting OoT without it plugged in.
Suddenly both cartridges worked absolutely fine.
I had a quick google to see if anyone else has documented this, and I found this one thread from 2014 observing the exact same thing. While no-one has any concrete info, they note that the Japanese version of OoT will boot with a DD plugged in, but returns an error message saying to insert the 'correct' expansion disk. So like F-Zero, OoT can detect the DD.
This makes sense - since OoT was developed far in advance of the DD's commercial release, they would have had to 'future proof' OoT to detect the DD add-on to allow for the planned Ura Zelda expansion. And since at this time a worldwide distribution was still the intention, it's likely US OoT cartridges have the same capability.
So why won't it boot and return a similar error message to the Japanese version? It could be one of two things: 1) the US copy doesn't have any such error message coded, and it crashes the game on booting due to no programmed behaviour, or 2) it's evidence of 64DD consoles being region-locked - since the US cartridge and Japanese DD don't match, the game refuses to boot. (EDIT: According to the TCRF OoT page there are translated error messages programmed and the game does carry out a region check of the DD, so that's the likely culprit.)
In any case, it turns out neither of my copies are broken, which is good news to me!Last edited by danstan21; 30-12-2020, 10:17. -
Wow. Pretty mad.Comment
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