#24453 - Stan64 - Tue Aug 03, 2004 10:14 pm
Is this true? My friends says that it don't work with certain new ways to save data on new games. What are these wats and are they good to use in own development? Do they save faster or use another bank or whatever?
#24801 - phrax - Wed Aug 11, 2004 7:35 pm
I have the F2A flash card - and your friend's right about the saves. There are only certain kinds of saves that will work on it, for instance, Breath of Fire 1, you can do the quick save, and it works fine. But if you were to rely on the regular save, it will crash the game and the save. You can't save using any Mario games, Final Fantasy Advance, Castlevania, etc..
I'm not sure if there is a cart that will allow you to save for those games. If anyone knows for certain what kind of save those games use, and how to get the F2A to support it, or what cartridge supports it, let the rest of us know.
#24803 - zazery - Wed Aug 11, 2004 8:13 pm
Commercial game saves don't work well on flash carts. The easiest and best solution is to use the original cart since Nintendo wouldn't license a product if it had bugs in it.
For development purposes there is a great article on using SRAM on gbadev.org. How your save fuction(s) can always be changed later on in the development process. If I remember correctly there are a few ways of saving on the GBA and the most common one is using SRAM.
Here are some exerts from gbatek:
Internal Memory
VRAM 96 KBytes
External Memory
GBA Game Pak max. 32MB ROM or flash ROM + max 64K SRAM
CGB Game Pak max. 32KB ROM + 8KB SRAM (more memory requires banking)
More information can be found in the gbatek document. I hope this answers your question.
#24813 - torne - Wed Aug 11, 2004 10:02 pm
All modern carts can deal with all save types, either natively or by patching Nintendo's backup library code during flash. Programs to patch roms explicity for older carts like the F2A are widely available. Google knows how to find them (except the one I wrote, but there's not much advantage to mine these days).
#28890 - greenllll - Mon Nov 08, 2004 3:12 pm
I've mostly used my F2A as a NES emulator.
The NES games will save, but there is no telling how long the save-state will remain on the cart. Sometimes the savestate will dissapear after a few days,sometimes the savestates only last a few hours. It is quite annoying. I tried changing the battery in the F2A cart, but the little sucker is soldered into the unit. I'll need to purchase a soldering gun... or possibly use some duct-tape or something before I can see if that will fix the it, but the cart has had those problems since I bought the unit.
Its a 128 m F2A cart & usb flasher.