wondering if anyone else has had this problem

[loup]

I'm almost done with my first noac portable and am noticing that I've been having a little bit of trouble with arkanoid (built-in game.) I'm getting some video artifacts at the top of the screen and on occasion it freezes when playing this game. Other games seem fine though. So should I just chalk it up to it being a problem with a crappy, pirate game, or is there something I can do about it?

One thing that I thought might be the source of the trouble is the fact that my noac has a quartz crystal on it, I desoldered it and reattached it with about 3 inches of wire. I'm guessing that all the crystal is there for is for video generation, which could explain the artifacting, but not really the freezing.

[daleighan]

the trouble probably has something to do with the fact that its a NOAC. Games are often screwy when running on a NOAC.

[marshallh]

I desoldered it and reattached it with about 3 inches of wire. I'm guessing that all the crystal is there for is for video generation, which could explain the artifacting, but not really the freezing.

Told ya
No really, the quartz crystal MUST be as close as possible to the NOAC to work properly. The farther away it gets, the more distorted the clock signal gets. And FYI, the quartz crystal doesn't just generate the video signal. It runs the entire NOAC, and if there is some distortion in the quartz from being too far away, then it can easily crash the NOAC.

[loup]

maybe, but I'm still somewhat skeptical that it's the quartz crystal. If it was the quartz crystal I would see some pretty nasty shifting of the colors, and I would have problems with more than just arkanoid. I've gone through about 20 or so of the games since moving the crystal and that's the only one that I've had any problems with.