#166962 - miamicanes - Tue Feb 24, 2009 10:32 pm
A couple of days ago, I bought a SP because I was under the impression that there's absolutely no way to program a stock DS via homebrew XBOO cable. Today, I'm frustrated because the only flash and i/o cartridges that seem to be available from companies still in business seem to be for the DS. I'm thinking about taking my SP back and exchanging it for a DS, but only if I can, in fact, run my own programs on it via multiboot and XBOO.
So... was my original impression correct? Is a stock DS a useless brick for homebrew purposes if all you have available is an XBOO cable? Or do you only need a special cartridge if you want to take advantage of DS-specific features?
Alternatively, if a DS *must* have a special card to unlock it, is it something I could build myself tonight if I have the necessary parts (I have a fairly big collection of Atmel AVRs, 74xxx, SRAM, Flash, FIFO, and other chips & parts at my disposal)? I don't mind the "cost" so much as the "wait" (if I could go to Gamestop and buy something like a dsBrut to play with tonight, it would be a done deal)... if it's something I could hack together tonight with parts I already have, that would change things a bit ;-)
#166971 - Funky Gibbon - Wed Feb 25, 2009 1:25 am
Hi,
I've been using Spercard SD for gba programming for a few years now and never had any problems with it, i would recoment it, also can be used on slot 2 of DS if used with passkey or ds flashed with nopass, of the two the gba sp is more versatile hardware wise but the ds does have touch screen, luckily i have both gba sp & ds, i also use supercard dsone if i need to free up slot 2 for hardware or the SD if i need slot one to be free
#166974 - gauauu - Wed Feb 25, 2009 4:54 am
Not answering your question, but the retailer discussed here: http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14429 has a "Fire Linker" which is a GBA flash card, for less than $10.
#166976 - miamicanes - Wed Feb 25, 2009 5:38 am
^^^ Actually, I tripped across it & ordered one ~3 hours ago after verifying from a few different sources that it did, in fact, work. For THAT price, even if it utterly and completely sucks as a tool for active development, it's probably worth owning at least one anyway, if only because it's cheap enough to flash a throwaway dumb terminal app onto and combine with a $19.95 GBA + hacked serial cable to get the cheapest color LCD with a controller money can buy ;-)
Just FYI, one possible use I have in mind is using a GBA as the controller & music-generator for my Christmas tree. Basically, I built a string of Christmas lights using RGB LEDs (each with its own Atmel ATtiny25 microcontroller) that are networked together. For 2008, I kind of cheated and had a laptop playing the music and controlling the lights, but for next year I'd like to make the whole thing self-contained.
Here's a video of my tree in action. It kind of gets off to a slow start (the first 34 seconds), and the part during the bridge where I'm showing off that I can control the lights individually ended up being a little more tedious than I thought it would be, but stick with it. You'll definitely be impressed when it launches into the song's climax ;-)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5qR9_8KGPU
#166987 - gauauu - Wed Feb 25, 2009 4:15 pm
| Quote: |
^^^ Actually, I tripped across it & ordered one ~3 hours ago after verifying from a few different sources that it did, in fact, work. For THAT price, even if it utterly and completely sucks as a tool for active development, it's probably worth owning at least one anyway, if only because it's cheap enough to flash a throwaway dumb terminal app onto and combine with a $19.95 GBA + hacked serial cable to get the cheapest color LCD with a controller money can buy ;-) |
I've purchased quite a few of them. They're not incredibly reliable, but they work fine. Transferring your code to them takes a 30 seconds or so, so it'll get annoying if you're doing it over and over again. But overall, they've been totally worth the price.
#167030 - miamicanes - Thu Feb 26, 2009 11:07 pm
What do you mean by "reliable"? Do you mean, "they go bad over time and develop errors or start malfunctioning?" Or just something like, "it might take a few tries to get one programmed successfully, but once it's programmed, it should be fine"?
#167041 - gauauu - Fri Feb 27, 2009 3:52 pm
I mean I've had one out of about 10 go bad over time (of course, this was one that I loaned to a high school kid, so who knows what he did with it), and one or two of them that don't always seat themselves well in the gba, and have to be pulled out and reinserted a few times.