So first off I bought my CV Ultimate SD several years ago from the retro game store nearby where I live. Apparently another collector had decided he was done and the Ultimate SD was part of his collection. Anyway, it has been working great up until very recently. Here is what has been happening:

- The first issue was that I was getting random lockups on the menu screen or games would just give me a black screen when I selected them. I eventually found that the SD card seemed to be at fault even though I believe it was the original 2GB sandisk that came with the cartridge originally back in the day. It seemed to be working okay again but would still give me the occasional SD read error when starting it up.

- Last night is while working trying to figure out what was wrong with an F18A that had been installed, a game I had on demo mode just froze. I rebooted the console and then the menu selector started to freeze up while moving the controller to try and select games. Then it would just come up to the Coleco title screen to insert a cartridge or sometimes would act like it was going to come up but give me a corrupted Atarimax screen and lock up.

I then reformatted my SD card and recopied over the files from a backup I made the last time I swapped out the SD cards and now it will only do one of two things:

It will either just give me a screen that is mostly all yellow with a small black bar at the top and bottom with another thin blue bar inside of that black bar. Or...

I can get it to come up if I remove the SD card in that it will give me the SD error message. But any SD card I put into it results in the screen described above. My guess is that something is screwy with the FW on the cart but I'd like to know if there is some sort of recovery for these? Since it isn't able to read SD cards anymore it appears, I'm not sure what else can be done to revive it?

Did you try another coleco?

Yes I does the same thing on 3 different CVs I currently have here for use.

I don't see where I can add a picture attachment but here is a link on my google drive of what I get on the screen when I boot it up.

(I added your file, Sijmen)

I am not into CV, but I do have a backup file from a friend.
Perhaps you can try it.

viewtopic.php?p=13851#p13851

If it does not sort it out, you need to contact Steve (and be patient), he will get in touch and help you out.

I appreciate that, it was actually that file I tried to use first. Here is what I think happened...

It has been flaky on and off but usually cleaning the SDcard would get it working etc.. Well, I decided to try a backup of the OS file I had from a year or so back but was using a CV I was actually servicing and installing an F18A into. Well, that F18A was apparently bad and causing random glitching and lockups. A big chunk of that was during the use of my CV Amax ultimate on it. So I think the F18A lockedup or something in the process of the CV cart trying to recover itself. And now...just that yellow screen above.

BTW, I did reach out to Steve at the same time I first posted this but hadn't gotten a reply as yet.

Wanted to provide an update that I've not received any email replies from Steve on this issue. I'm using a different flash cartridge currently for my console service work, but would really like to get my CV Ultimate working again.

Try Facebook

What is Steve's FB profile?

send me an email

Sorry,

I just logged in and saw this reply. Another owner reached out to me the other day and sent me the recovery files and instructions directly. Last night I was able to follow that process and got my CV Ultimate SD back up and running! Unless there are newer files that should be used than the ones I was given that were from 4 years ago?