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Flash Equipment > Which (if any) gba flash carts are compatibly with a ds?

#36417 - slacker - Sat Feb 19, 2005 8:06 am

Sry if this is a noob question, but I couldnt find any info searching. I have a modded xbox and know all about that. But this is my first time looking into flash carts and I recently bought a ds and I was wondering which flash carts would work on my ds for backing up gba roms...thanks

#36423 - MumblyJoe - Sat Feb 19, 2005 1:22 pm

Your question isn't clear and you may be in the wrong place to ask this. Please provide more information about exactly what it is you wan't to achieve.
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#36429 - Abscissa - Sat Feb 19, 2005 5:00 pm

Backing up commercial games is outside the scope of this board. It's considered piracy by the powers that be (Nintendo), so we don't deal with any such things on this board because we don't want to get on N's bad side.

This is homebrew development community, so if you're interested in development, here's the deal with the DS: Many (all?) of the good flash carts use the GBA's serial port to transfer data to/from the flash cart. The DS doesn't have a serial port so there's two choices: 1. Find some sort of flash cart that doesn't use the serial port (I don't know if these are any good or if they're even available). or 2. Pick up a cheap used GBA to write to the carts (I've seen non-SP's at EB and GameStop recently for only about $40). Also, the carts that use the serial port cannot be used to back up commercial games (Which is why Nintendo hasn't shut them down).

#36431 - tepples - Sat Feb 19, 2005 7:26 pm

Abscissa wrote:
The DS doesn't have a serial port so there's two choices: 1. Find some sort of flash cart that doesn't use the serial port (I don't know if these are any good or if they're even available).

EFA (Extreme Flash Advance) has a USB port on the cart itself and is IMHO the recommended flash cart for Nintendo DS owners to run GBA programs. Use case: remove cart from GBA or DS, connect to PC, write ROMs, disconnect from PC, insert cart in GBA, play. My 9-year-old cousin loves his EFA, mostly for PocketNES graphics hacks that he makes.

Quote:
Also, the carts that use the serial port cannot be used to back up commercial games (Which is why Nintendo hasn't shut them down).

Bull. Insert Game Pak and turn on GBA while holding Start+Select, and many of the multiboot slave programs uploaded by the flash software can dump the ROM over the serial port. Even the MBV2 software has a hidden option (mb -1 rom.gba -w 250) to do this. It's EFA that can't be used to back up games.
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#36433 - Abscissa - Sat Feb 19, 2005 9:36 pm

tepples wrote:
Quote:
Also, the carts that use the serial port cannot be used to back up commercial games (Which is why Nintendo hasn't shut them down).

Bull. Insert Game Pak and turn on GBA while holding Start+Select, and many of the multiboot slave programs uploaded by the flash software can dump the ROM over the serial port. Even the MBV2 software has a hidden option (mb -1 rom.gba -w 250) to do this. It's EFA that can't be used to back up games.

Ahh. Faulty assumption on my part. :)