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Flash Equipment > GBA Movie Player and original GB roms question.

#31836 - dmgice - Wed Dec 15, 2004 4:14 am

Long time reader, first time poster here.

Before I ask my question, may as well introduce myself. I run a website that can be reached by adding .com to the end of my name. That's really all people need to know about me. (Yes. I am THAT Philip.....)

Onto the question! I searched the forums for a post on this, but I was unable to find it. I have a GBA Movie Player from Lik-Sang, and I heard that it was possible to alter the pocketNES file so that you can piggyback a GB rom. I kinda HAVE to see what Link's Awakening looks like on the sharper DS screen and I'm a little reluctant to buy other flash gear yet. I probably will end up doing that, but for now.. I want to try using my GBA Movie Player to do that and I'm unsure of what I have to do to tweak the pocketnes.gba file.

Thank you in advance.
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#31841 - PhoenixSoft - Wed Dec 15, 2004 4:56 am

I would like to know the answer to that question too, as I am getting a GBA Movie Player soon.

I do have a question of my own, though: Is it possible to play homebrew GBA games on it? It should be as easy as putting a fake emulator file on there that redirects to a ROM. I know commercial GBA ROMs won't work on it, but shouldn't homebrew ROMs work?

#31845 - dmgice - Wed Dec 15, 2004 5:36 am

GBA roms wouldn't work on their own from the card. Already tried that out. Although, changing a rom name to what the firmware does read (pocketNES.gba) may work. You'd probably have to create a blank NES rom that just force-runs the pocketNES.gba file. You'd have to rename... say "GBAdemogame.gba" to "pocketNES.gba" and go from there.

Oh, congratulations on ordering one. I like mine a lot. You can fit a ton of stuff on the device if you have a large enough CF card. I have a 4.0GB CF card. ^_^ I'm barely using 1GB right now, but I have a few whole albums of songs, and about 4 hours of High Quality compressed video. Currently I have the first Read or Die OVA, all of the flash animation "The Big Bunny", a ton of AMVs, the first episode of Keroro Gunsu, and more on it. I'm currently converting the MOVs that were made of the PSP UMD ejection error so I can show it off to people on the DS. Why? Because it is ironic. ^_^ Currently playing is a complete copy of the PMM Trance Album. I got mine, ripped it to MP3, encoded it in the right format for the player, deleted the MP3s, and went with it. Right now, I'm working on putting together slideshows and original audio files to make a presentation to play on the GB Player on TV. The GBA Movie Player is pretty versatile. They recently added multiple language support so you can read Korean text files, Hebrew text files, etc.

Oh, the nes emu used by the system is limited only to the GBA memory cache in terms of rom size. But a lot of good stuff like Rygar and Goonies 1 are tiny enough.
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#32359 - Dwedit - Tue Dec 21, 2004 10:45 am

I think the movie player has some kind of hardcoded <192k limit somewhere. I made a special version of pocketnes that supports 216k roms, and it refuses to run them.
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#32445 - dmgice - Wed Dec 22, 2004 11:09 pm

Yeah. It uploads the emu and the NES rom into the GBA's memory at the same time. Which is why there's a bit of a limit.
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#36186 - mrnull - Tue Feb 15, 2005 8:10 pm

Maybe a boot-loader would work? Something small enough to load into 192K and then execute the code?

#36187 - wardrich - Tue Feb 15, 2005 9:23 pm

I recall a program for the PC called Meteor or something similar. It could convert .wmv/.avi/.mpg and who knows what else into .gba. Convert the movie and flash it to the cart. Then you can play it on your GBA.

I'm not sure if there's more to the movie player since everybody seems to be talking about it, but that's the best solution I have. (by the way, it's free)

-Richard-

#36190 - Lynx - Tue Feb 15, 2005 10:06 pm

Don't know if it helps, but there is a version of pocketnes.gba that supports compressed .nes files.. so it will handle up to 256k roms..

#36299 - mrnull - Thu Feb 17, 2005 1:19 am

I heard the 200k restriction is from where the GBAMP loads the pocketnes.gba file into ram with the rom attached. Still, if it can play movies you'd think there'd be a way to increase the available size and even run larger GBA homebrew applications.

If someone could hack this it'd be a VERY cheap homebrew alternative. Even better, it's available at major retailers like Lik-Sang.

#36307 - Lynx - Thu Feb 17, 2005 4:11 am

I think it would just be easier to buy the super card for around $40. It has onboard ram to resolve this issue. It's all based off of speed. I'm guessing movies don't need to load as fast as games, and therfore the cart can swap bits of data into ram as it is being played.