GBA Flash, Linkers, Carts, ROMs etc

I've been reading about these gba carts & linkers and emulators etc. It's all kind of confusing if you haven't been following the development from the beginning. I have a gba sp and want to be able to backup my games and to consolidate these games onto 1 cart. You guys are the experts, what would you recommend today? I see 512, 1gb, 2gb etc carts and link cables, readers, emulators etc. Man it's a mess trying to figure out what I could or should use and these carts are expensive. It looks like, with the right emulator, I could play the gb games on my pc, that would be cool and also that I could down load home grown gb game, that to would be cool. I don't want to invest my hard earned $ on the wrong stuff. Any help would be apprecitated.
Thanks
zordaz

You've got a distinction here that you may want to make first: NAND based or NOR based. Carts that use NOR flash are slow to write to, have limited capacity, and are very expensive. In addition, you cannot delete entries off the cart - you have to reflash the entire cartridge if you want to make changes (though you can add more games to the end without reflashing if you have room). However, they function almost exactly like an actual GBA cartridge once flashed. NAND based carts use either built-in flash or removable storage like CF or SD cards, which gives you a lot more space for less money. However, they usually have a few features missing, like the real-time clock and advanced savegame management. I personally have both, because I bought the NOR-based one several years ago for the GBA and then bought a NAND-based one later for advanced usage on the DS.

Popular NOR-based cartridges are the Flash2Advance Ultra and the EZ-Flash line, among others. They are expensive though. A 1 Gigabit (128 Megabyte) F2AU cart cost me $125, though it's at about $100 now. At the time, I was sorely tempted by the $70 XROM, which was 512 Mbits (64 Mbytes), as it was a good deal. However, for GBA gaming, it serves its purpose very well. These carts usually connect to your computer via a linker, with one end with USB and the other end with a serial port that plugs into your GBA's link port. These linkers usually also allow you to dump official games (I think I'm allowed to mention that).

NAND-based media cards like CF and SD are too slow for GBA gaming by design, so NAND-based adapters copy the games into fast RAM and execute them from there. While this shortens the battery life, it gives you the advantage of using a CF or SD card to begin with, which is much more convenient, as you can freely add, delete, edit, and move files to and from the card using a card reader. This means you can't dump your own games though, but you can purchase a linker cable on the side for $15 or so if you want to do that.

Popular NAND-based devices are the Supercard and M3, but since you're going to be using it for GBA gaming mostly, I'd suggest the M3, as the Supercard has slower RAM that makes some games slow down or simply crash. Get the M3 Perfect, not Pro (the Pro has very little RAM and therefore supports only very small GBA binaries), and I'd suggest the miniSD version (not the same as Slim SD) if you don't want it to stick out of the GBA. While the M3 is fairly expensive, you end up paying much less for the same amount of storage, and you can always increase your storage capacity by buying another cheap miniSD card rather than buying a whole new $100 cart like you would have to with a NOR-based cart.

I would use NAND if I were you as it will save you a lot of money and Flash memory is really cheap. But I would also like to add that some of these carts can be illigal to import so I would check them first. just to be on the safe side I would get an M3/G6 or EZFlash.

Well, you guys have given more new information that I wasn't expecting to get.. If I got the M3 cart I would also have to get a miniSD card to go in it right? How then, do I back up the games that I own? The last I heard it is still legal to backup what you own. Once I got the game backed up, I can see then how you could use the M3 to restore the game if my original got damaged. This sounds like what I want but the original backup has me confused. thanks

Yes, you'd need both the M3 and a miniSD card. If you want to use it in a DS for launching DS code, you'll also need a NoPass device like the Passcard 3, but this is not needed for launching GBA code.

There is no way to use the M3 alone to backup games, but you can use one of those linker cables to do it. Something like http://linker4u.com/pp/item_detail.asp?itemID={AB02EC20-5BE6-4EE6-9EC9-E225FD3C0BB6} would work, as you could use the shareware FlashManager program to dump the games (the official PowerWriter software can dump games but only after it has linked up with the F2A Ultra cart in the first place, while FlashManager can skip this step). You would insert the game, start the software, turn on the GBA with Start and Select held, and then select what you want to do from the menu that appears on your PC screen.

The only place I can find a usb linker cable is at linker4u. Is that a safe site to make purchases from? Also, looking for a good miniSD I found this: Transcend 4GB mini SDHC Card
(MPN: TS4GSDMHC)
Price Range: $37.95 - $76.94 from 7 Sellers
Rebates & Special Offers: $5.00 Bonus available
Description: mini SDHC (SD High-Capacity) is the new generation of SD cards (Version 2.0). Formatted in FAT32, mini SDHC cards reach a maximum capacity of 32GB and can fulfill the high-capacity demand of the new mini SDHC devices such as Casio Exilim Z1.... Read More
Description: mini SDHC (SD High-Capacity) is the new generation of SD cards (Version 2.0). Formatted in FAT32, mini SDHC cards reach a maximum capacity of 32GB and can fulfill the high-capacity demand of the new mini SDHC devices such as Casio Exilim Z1000/Z600/S600 cameras, Panasonic DMC-L1 camera, and HP printer A/B.

4G High Density .. you think this will work okay in the M3. (I've purchased and received my M3 by the way).. Thanks

I purchased a few items from Linker4U without trouble, though I've heard others that didn't have such good service. I think it mostly pertains to people ordering items listed as being in stock on the website only to find that they are sold out.

I'm not sure if the SDHC cards will work on an M3. I know they most likely won't work on a Supercard, but I'm not sure about the M3.

Okay, I'll stay away from the High Density/Capacity chip.

I can't find that linker cable in stock anywhere else, (except another Chinese site).

Any other sites? let me know..

Picked up a 1Gb miniSD today from Best Buy, about $30.00 plugged it into my usb attached reader. Installed M3 Game Manager V32B and began copying some of the freebe gba_homebrew games to the memory. Plugged it into the M3 and the M3 into my GBA and I was off and running. Need to get some music and movies to load next. Still looking form a linker cable.. thanks for the help.

For music, you can either use the M3's converters to convert the music to GBM audio, or you could use the GBA GSM Player by Tepples, in which you first convert to high-quality WAV and then put the wave files in a folder and hit go.bat to get the output "gsm.gba" file.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DanTheManMS

However, they usually have a few features missing, like the real-time clock and advanced savegame management.

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Hi, new member here, I just wanted to say thanks for the useful post, i'm also new to the whole gba homebrew/modding scene. The main reason i want to get into this is so i can play some of those games i never got around to buying at the time of release and are hard to find now, but being able to make backups of the games i own would be nice too.
I also have some questions.
First, will i be able to put ANY gba or gb rom i downloaded on the card, and then just play like it was a normal, official cartrigde? If the rom has been tested and works fine on an emulator, that is.
Second, the part i quoted worries me a bit. Does it mean that i wont be able to save my progress in some games, and is the realtime clock important for some games?
Third, can I backup GB games too if i find the cable you're speaking of?
Fourth, if i one day buy a DS, will i be able to use the miniSD for the DS too, and will i be able to play GB games on that as well, possibly with an emulator?

We're treading on thin ice here, but I'll try to answer your questions while still staying within forum rules.

GBA files will run natively on the slot-2 device fine. GB and GBC files must be run via an emulator, of which the most popular and compatible is Goomba Color. You can create a Goomba Color compilation right now and test it in VBA to see how it will function. See the PocketHeaven Wiki entry on Goomba for instructions on using the Goomba frontend to create a compilation.

Similarly, if you got a linker cable you could dump your own GBA cartridges but not GB or GBC ones, as those use a different processor that runs at a different voltage. Same with dumping save files. Note that you can also dump/restore save files to/from official cartridges with a homebrew application called cart_save, so you no longer need a linker cable to do this.

To be honest I'm not really sure what I meant by "advanced savegame management" hehe. You'll be fine with any slot-2 device, as they should all save correctly. Real-time clock is only important for a few games, most notably some GBA Pokemon games that use the RTC for time-based events like berry growing and nocturnal Pokemon catching.

If you get a DS and want to use your slot-2 device, you will have to buy a slot-1 NoPass device to launch it in DS mode before you can launch DS binaries. Without the NoPass it will function exactly the same as it does in your GBA. There are a couple GB/GBC emulators for the DS as well, the most notable being Lameboy.

For what you want to do, I'd suggest a NAND-based device. Of these, since it will be used primarily for GBA gaming, I'd suggest either an M3 Perfect (not Pro) or an EZ-Flash IV (be careful which version you get as some can't run all GBA games, I think it's the Compact you want to avoid but I'm not sure). Look into these two and see which one you wish to buy.