Hello, I’m a brand new GS user and I bought this hoping to learn more about electronics and some forms of programming, but I think I messed up big time and I’m wondering if all hope is lost.
It started out with me trying to play Dragon Quest I+II, I noticed some sound issues on one of the SNES emulators so I switched to a different one and while they were fixed, I noticed the resolution was weird. I went into the video settings hoping to change them to my liking but I ended up causing the resolution to completely crush (apparently it had to do with the refresh rate running at 60.000?) I couldn’t find my way past the now unintelligible menus, so I looked for some kind of system setting that I hoped would reset. I noticed there was an update to the launcher, so I decided to do that while thinking of a way to fix my resolution issue.
However, the launcher update caused my system to seemingly be stuck on a loading screen. I looked up the issue and I read that I needed to flash my SD card with the 0.5 OS image, so I did that. But after I did so, my GS wouldn’t even go past the logo screen, and I looked up this issue and found that apparently I could flash the SD card with the 0.3 OS image and that would fix everything…but even after that I couldn’t boot past the logo screen.
I’m new to this sort of DIY thing so I know I did something I shouldn’t have, and that I needed to be more careful and have paid more attention to directions. Is there any way to get my GS to boot up again? At this point I don’t care about restoring lost files, I wasn’t more than an hour into any games. If there’s any way to get my GS working again, please let me know! Thank you!
Hmmm. I had a issue like this last month. I turned on my GameShell and it would not get past the “happy hacking” screen. I recovered my files using extFS on my Mac to read the system files and recover all the games, then I refreshed the SD card and put all my junk back onto there. You might as well want to replace the GameShell on Amazon if you bought it from there.
makes sense. I ended up getting it to work thanks to the help of a friend who walked me through completely wiping the SD card and re-imaging it from scratch. Lesson learned: wait a few minutes before calling it a crash
I seem to be having the same issue too with my GameShell. How do u reflash the SD card like your friend showed you? My GameShell won’t get past the loading screen, I reflashed it’s SD card after it was having a bunch of weird glitches and it still won’t get past the loading screen. I guess the GameShell can’t find the config.ini file that it needs to load the interface?
its complicated, but from what i remember i used my pc’s disk management function to wipe the sd card clean. what i found the be the issue was that some of the data on the sd card was corrupted and would not go away by means of a simple format, so i thoroughly destroyed all the data on the sd card.
then, i used 7zip to extract the image files from the os image that i downloaded. then i used a program called rufus to flash the new image files to the sd card (i found that etcher was bungling the job) and then i used a program called ext2fsd to mount the files on the sd card to F:, as i think this program allows windows to read linux extensions.
keep in mind i am not knowledgable in these areas, i just did what my friend told me (and they said they were just going on autopilot lol) and these are not detailed instructions either. i recommend looking up how to thoroughly format sd cards and asking someone u know who might be more computer saavy for input on the flashing and extraction process.
addendum: i didnt do anything to any kind of .ini file - if somethings wrong with that and its not coming from the data on the sd card (i dont know how the gameshells internal files work, and/or if more than just the cloud image is stored on the sd card) so be prepared to face an entirely separate issue if this doesnt work. you might want to look into the gameshell discord, you can easily find a link to an invitation on the clockwork home page i believe.
yeah, i dont mean to say that i would recommend this as a go-to method lol. especially since i am far from experienced in any kind of involved programming when it comes to non windows stuff. i was just explaining what I ended up doing at the direction of someone who was available at the moment. win32diskimager sounds much more effecient, and ill be sure to use it myself if this ever happens again. thank you for the suggestion!
In my opinion you shouldn’t be afraid to try different things, or do things in a different way that is the “recommended way”. Let’s say that this is the “DIY thing”, and “Linux thing”.
It is very difficult (impossible?) to brake the hardware by just changing configurations. Now that you learned how to flash the SD card you can try more things
Yes, I meant that to brake the system just changing randomly a config file shouldn’t be a problem. In the worst case it wouldn’t boot, and you reflash it.
In the case of changing the CPU configuration, you really need to want to do it. To change the frequency to an unsafe frequency you need to recompile the device tree file (dts), change the available frequencies and specify what is the voltage that needs to be set to the power regulator for that specific frequency… This kind of config is not available to the user, and it is not a simple procedure. You really need to know what you are doing, and at this point you already assumed the risks.
In the past I admit that changing a config could easily damage things. I heard people that damaged CRT screens by configuring Xorg in the wrong way. In my entire life the only thing I remember was when I broke one HD when I was a kid trying to install Debian 2 in a 486 already old PC without knowing any English, but maybe that was just a coincidence.
