Harmony crashes

[SenorRossie]

Hi,

 

 

I recently updated my harmony cartridge to the latest release (1.3) and have been having the following issue with it ever since.

 

Steps to reproduce:

- Update the cart via the (windows) harmony tool (tried 1.1, and 1.3 ntsc, pal50, pal60 and others, but I don't recall exact versions and regions).

- Copy the hbios.bin to the root of the SD card(s) (same version as flashed on the cart), both with the harmony tool and manually.

- Insert Harmony with SD card in a working 2600 (tried several, all work fine with regular carts) and power on the system

- BIOS is successfully updated and the Harmony cart restarts.

 

After the final restart, or after power off/on of the console, I see the rotating yin and yang symbol on the screen and after a second or so the cart crashes, resulting in black/green/white vertical bars on the screen.

 

Any hints on how to get the harmony encore in working condition again?

 

 

Kind regards,

Senor Rossie

 

P.S. The cart worked flawlessy for a couple of years running the ntsc firmware (I think) that it came with pre-installed.

[+batari]

Hi,

 

 

I recently updated my harmony cartridge to the latest release (1.3) and have been having the following issue with it ever since.

 

Steps to reproduce:

- Update the cart via the (windows) harmony tool (tried 1.1, and 1.3 ntsc, pal50, pal60 and others, but I don't recall exact versions and regions).

- Copy the hbios.bin to the root of the SD card(s) (same version as flashed on the cart), both with the harmony tool and manually.

- Insert Harmony with SD card in a working 2600 (tried several, all work fine with regular carts) and power on the system

- BIOS is successfully updated and the Harmony cart restarts.

 

After the final restart, or after power off/on of the console, I see the rotating yin and yang symbol on the screen and after a second or so the cart crashes, resulting in black/green/white vertical bars on the screen.

 

Any hints on how to get the harmony encore in working condition again?

 

 

Kind regards,

Senor Rossie

 

P.S. The cart worked flawlessy for a couple of years running the ntsc firmware (I think) that it came with pre-installed.

 

The 1.1 and 1.3 you refer to sound like versions of the Harmony programming utility. These come packaged with a BIOS version that is too old for Harmony Encore.

For a Harmony Encore, you need version 1.06 of the BIOS (attached to this post.)

Copy the attached BIOS file to the root directory of an SD card and make sure any other files starting with “hbios” have been removed from the card or it may load the wrong one. Then proceed with the update as you have tried before.

hbios_106_NTSC_beta5.bin

[SenorRossie]

The 1.1 and 1.3 you refer to sound like versions of the Harmony programming utility. These come packaged with a BIOS version that is too old for Harmony Encore.

I indeed was referring to the flash utility for the PC.

 

For a Harmony Encore, you need version 1.06 of the BIOS (attached to this post.)

A fact that is unfortunately not mentioned in the manual(s), as far as I can tell. Hopefully this thread is of use of others that suffer the same fate

 

Copy the attached BIOS file to the root directory of an SD card and make sure any other files starting with hbios have been removed from the card or it may load the wrong one. Then proceed with the update as you have tried before.

I copied the file to the root of the SD card and renamed it to hbios.bin, flashed the harmony cartridge with the ntsc firmware using the PC tool (v1.3) and fired up the 2600. All is working fine now (although after the 1st boot, i was able to only move up/down 1 position in the file list. A power toggle resolved this).

 

Not sure if I will encounter a lot of issues with the NTSC firmware living in PAL country, but for now everything works just fine.

 

Thanks!

Senor Rossie

[alex_79]

Not sure if I will encounter a lot of issues with the NTSC firmware living in PAL country, but for now everything works just fine.

Using the NTSC firmware results in the menu being in PAL60 (which most pal TV from the '90s onward support just fine) and with wrong colors (e.g. blue text insetad of green).

The games themselves are unaffected by the TV format of the menu, so if the menu displays fine on your TV, you won't have any issues.