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Flash Equipment > top technical linker help

#14892 - gbanewbie - Wed Jan 14, 2004 1:40 pm

I am newbie to GBA development so some perhaps dumb questions.
I just got a china/taiwan made (much cheaper) linker, loaded
my .gba file (compiled with devboyadv/gcc from sourceforge) which
works fine on emulator (visualboy advance) but when I plug
the cartridge in the GBA and turn it on, I just got the "game boy"
logo (and some garbage underneath)... so my questions are

1. it doesn't recognize the title ... is there some standard title header
global variable I should have in my .c or .h file?
2. is loading a single .gba file good enough? or do I need to load
other stuff in the cartridge as well?
3. or does this sound more like a low battery (the loaded file persists
even after i unplugged it from the linker though) or a cartridge contact
with the GBA problem?

The linker I got is like the (second item) one shown here
http://www.sagame.com/products/e-products.HTM

Thanks, any reply appreciated

#14913 - tepples - Wed Jan 14, 2004 7:50 pm

"Garbage underneath" may mean you need to use one of the header fix tools on your ROM. GBA programs are supposed to carry a 156-byte "magic cookie" that represents a compressed Nintendo logo bitmap. Emulators usually ignore the header, but the GBA hardware doesn't. If you put multiple ROMs in one cart, the menu software prepended to the ROMs will usually carry a proper header, but a single-ROM cart needs its own header. Try DarkFader's GBA Rom Fixer, available from gbadev.org's header tools section.
_________________
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#15041 - gbanewbie - Fri Jan 16, 2004 3:22 pm

tepples,

Thanks alot! That's exactly what the problem was. I used deixu's
GBA-header tool to edit the header and it works! (Thanks
deixu for the tool if you are reading... :)

I have not read anywhere that I have to modify the header
myself... I supposed other linker software does that automatically?
Anyway, I am happy, thanks again very much.

#15042 - SimonB - Fri Jan 16, 2004 3:25 pm

Yes, some (most?) flash clients add a correct header automatically.