Animal Crossing, Minecraft freezing during saving

[emuman100]

I can't seem to find any clues, but I'm having an interesting problem. On my Mariko V2 switch with picofly running atmosphere 1.6.2 with 15.0.1, FAT32 formatted SD card, Animal Crossing freezes at the first save point after you get done with the first day on your island. Minecraft had the same issue where it would freeze when saving. The save file was not created in Animal crossing but was on Minecraft. Both games are installed to the SD card and atmosphere is running on the sysnand, in airplane mode.

Initially, I had used DBI to install the titles from game cards. Thinking it was that, I deleted it and installed from an nsp. This time, I had installed the latest update, so no matter the game version or where it was installed from Animal Crossing still froze at the first save point. Did anyone run into this problem? I'm not using any cheats or mods. Anything I could check for or investigate? Luigi's Mansion 3 runs without issues with saving.

Thanks.

 

[hartleyshc]

I would look more at the SD card.

Could be a cheap card, or could be dying.



Game files of course could be corrupted, but the fact that these freezes happen with saving make me want to look more into the SD card.

 

[emuman100]

The SD card is new. I'll do some diagnostics in Hekate and see. After the games freeze, all titles are unable to start without a reboot. Could that be SD card related? If a game is installed on the SD card, is the save also stored on the SD card too?

 

[emuman100]

I wanted to provide an update. The SD card was good. I tried another but also had good results, so I eliminated that.

The error I was getting was 2002-3540 which is an eMMC access error. These errors would happen with Animal Crossing and Minecraft saving because game saves are stored on the eMMC. All of the backups I had installed would not start. I would restore the eMMC with the backup of the raw eMMC and BOOT0/1 and I'd get 2002-3540 errors in DBI when installing. These issues happened more and more, so I thought I'd try another hwfly.

I ordered a replacement hwfly from a source on Aliexpress that was known to be to send working hwfly's and still the same access error and errors with games not starting from the menu after reinstalling installing and restoring the eMMC. So, the last ditch effort was either to use a supported RP2040 board like the Waveshare Pico, but before that, I wanted to try replacing the eMMC module. I ordered two from Aliexpress, hoping one of them which was probably pulled from a dead switch would be good.

I installed the eMMC module and restored the backup raw eMMC GPP and BOOT0/1. On an unrelated note, Hekate reported a 2017 manufacturing year for the eMMC. Everything came back to life as expected. I installed backups, including Animal Crossing and Minecraft, and when testing saving, no freezing at all! I would test multiple times, both games, and everything works as it should. This eMMC seems stable now like in my Switch Lite. So, I believe the eMMC was definitely bad. I hope the naysayers about making backups finally see the light in how important they are.

I'm not sure if the original hwfly caused the eMMC to fail with access failures or if it was just bad. This Mariko V2 was a refurbished unit from the Nintendo Store, so if it was indeed bad prior to all of this, Nintendo's repair group did limited testing on it. Perhaps it was originally sent in for freezing (I have read about isolated cases of unhacked Switches freezing while saving with Animal Crossing), but who knows. I'm not sure how a "bad" hwfly poorly assembled or whatever at the factory could cause eMMC failure.

I hope this post helps others having similar issues.