[theo cupier]

Bought a game recently from Ebay secondhand (Spectrobes, for my son's birthday).

I tested it in his new DSLite before his birthday and found that on one occasion the DS didn't register the cart as inserted. The screen said "no cart". I took the game out, wiped the contacts and put it back in and all was fine, thought nothing more of it.

Son came to play the game today and found that it crashed on a couple of occasions while he was playing - it just froze. Not something I'd seen before with a DS game.

So, I had a closer look at the game cart. Outwardly it appears to be a genuine cart (not that I could tell a fake) and it seems to be in OK physical condition. However, when I shake the cart it rattles, which none of our other game carts do.

It seems as if whatever is inside a DS game cart is loose inside this one. Does that sound right? (Don't know much about the internals of DS carts, as you may guess.)

Although the Ebay seller has offered to refund me, I wanted to check whether there was any simple way of fixing the game cart, rather than go through the lottery of returning the game and waiting for my money to come back.

Is a cart like this repairable? If so, how?

[iceyd]

tbh I doubt anyone would know without actually having an idea of what's actually been broken inside. So if you choose not to open it and find out first then I suggest just getting a refund.

[theo cupier]

True, but I was starting from a far more basic position of wondering whether the average person can actually open these things up and whether they would find anything "user servicable" inside...

If the words "soldering iron" are likely to feature in a reply then I'm out. But if it's just a question of clipping some solid state memory back in place, then I might be up for it.

[iceyd]

I haven't heard of anyone doing such a thing personally but the assumption is that either soldering or using glue would fix any loose bits back to the circuit.