Game Boy Advance flash cartridge

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A Game Boy Advance flash cartridge is one of several cartridges containing flash memory that been developed for use in the Nintendo Game Boy Advance. These cartridges enable homebrew applications and games to be used on a GBA. The capacity of the cartridges ranges from 64Mbits up to 8Gbits (Commercial carts are 32Mbits). Sizes of cartridges are always measured in megabits or gigabits as opposed to megabytes and gigabytes. More recent cartridges use external memory cards as memory, in place of onboard memory, such as Compact Flash, Secure Digital, etc. memory cards.

These cartridges remain the best-known way to create and distribute homebrew games for the GBA (the other being the GBA Movie Player, which can run specially designed homebrew programs but cannot run illicit copies of commercial GBA Game cartridges due to the lack of onboard RAM for fast data access).

Contents

[edit] Linkers

Extreme Flash Advance, USB port built-in
Extreme Flash Advance, USB port built-in

Games are written to the cartridge with a device called "linker". Depending on the brand of flash cartridge, the linker either connects to the GBA and writes the cartridge through the GBA, or has a cartridge slot that allows the user to insert the cartridge directly into the linker. Most linkers are capable of copying ROM information from commercial Game Boy Advance software cartridges. More recent cartridges have built-in mini-USB jacks which plug directly into a PC with the appropriate cable. Others use digital media card (SD,MMC,CF, etc.) in which files are put on via a Card Reader.

[edit] Flash card adapters

Recently a number of devices have been released which use popular flash memory cards such as SD and CF for storage. These have proven popular since the development of techniques to run Nintendo DS software from a GBA cartridge, due to the large size of DS games and the low price of these cards compared to conventional GBA flash cartridges. Examples of such devices include the M3 and Supercard.

[edit] Emulators

Different emulators are available for different operating systems on a GBA flash cartridge. The main emulators currently available include:

[edit] Brands

There are many brands of Flash Cartridges available, including:

  • X-ROM
  • EZF Advance
  • QBus QBoy
  • EZ2 PowerStar
  • GB-Bridge
  • Flash FX4
  • XG Flash 2
  • F2A Ultra
  • DS Linker
  • Flash2Advance
  • EFA-Linker (256Mbit, 512Mbit, 1Gbit, and 2Gbit(?) sizes are available)
  • WiseBox Wise Card
  • G-Bank
  • EZ-Flash
  • Flash Advance (FA Turbo, FA Pro)
  • Flash Advance Xtreme USB
  • g6 flash
  • DSGBAFLASH
  • SuperCard Series:

[edit] Software

There are those that use a program called LittleWriter to write games to the cartridges. However, some people (especially people with older computers) use other software to write games to the cartridge. An example of this software is X-ROM Frontend by DanSoft Australia.

Some flash cartridges use specialized software designed for the specific cartridge, such as Power Writer and USB Writer software for the Flash2Advance Ultra cartridges. This presents several conflicts in regard to homebrew, as Power Writer uses a large database for proper naming and saving of games. ROMs that are not in the database (such as emulators or any other GBA homebrew) are prone to saving issues, and editing the database manually is difficult and involves the use of a hex editor. Such cartridges often have a proprietary interface, making it difficult or impossible to use operating systems other than Microsoft Windows for writing to the cartridge.

[edit] External links

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