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Flash Equipment > g-bank "Game Bank" Review

#44275 - vaevictus - Tue May 31, 2005 4:50 pm

To Preface, I am not widely experienced with flashroms and gba's.

I bought a g-bank from http://www.divineo.cn

It came with a usb cable, and a cdrom with some software on it... it looked to me like the software wasn't necessarily legal (had reg keys in text files and such).

regardless, the device appears to function more or less as advertised. I'm not a huge fan of it. Personally, I'd have made the device a bit differently.

point 1: Drag and Drop to device.
Sorta. I could not find any way of utilizing the device without an SD card. I believe it may be possible to copy directly from a card to the onboard flashrom, but you *cannot* copy from usb to the flashrom.
It does, however, provide a fast write to the SD card you put in it. (the device shows up as a removable drive, not as a usb mass storage device like a usb memory thinger.

point 2: utility:
as you can't write directly into the flash rom... it does require a few extra steps. this isn't so bad. The write to the SD card is fast enough that it wouldn't matter much. The onboard software provides for firmware updates as well as all possibilities of file management. see point 3.

point 3: onboard flash is slow.
I don't have anything else to compare to... but It seems to me that it's *unnecessarily* slow. My friend informs me that that's standard. I'm a bit too much of a spur of the moment gamer to tolerate waiting 10 minutes for a game to be *deleted* so I can wait 20 minutes for it to copy.

Summary: If you're going to be using SD as the core of the communications system... why not use RAM instead of flash. If you could write the game as fast as you could read the rom, and then use the power from the gba to keep the RAM fresh... it seems like it'd save a *LOT* of time. I'd conceivably pay a lot more for that convenience. I still think you should be able to write usb to the onboard memory.

#44339 - tepples - Tue May 31, 2005 9:48 pm

vaevictus wrote:
Summary: If you're going to be using SD as the core of the communications system... why not use RAM instead of flash.

You just described the SuperCard.

Downside is that GBA-side firmware is needed to copy the game from the SuperCard's CF card into RAM every time you turn the system on. [offtopic]This makes the SuperCard less useful on, say, the Nintendo DS than a flash-based device.[/offtopic]
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#44416 - vaevictus - Wed Jun 01, 2005 4:10 pm

[quote="tepples"][quote="vaevictus"]Summary: If you're going to be using SD as the core of the communications system... why not use RAM instead of flash.[/quote]
You just described the SuperCard.

Downside is that GBA-side firmware is needed to copy the game from the SuperCard's CF card into RAM every time you turn the system on. [offtopic]This makes the SuperCard less useful on, say, the Nintendo DS than a flash-based device.[/offtopic][/quote]

How long does it take to copy into ram?
How does it make it less useful on a DS?

#44431 - dragonmc - Wed Jun 01, 2005 7:12 pm

Just read some reviews on the SuperCard. It differs from the G-Bank in several ways.

First of all, it does load ROMs from the flash card much faster. 5 to 10 seconds for uncompressed ROMs and 10 to 30 seconds for compressed is what most people have been reporting.

It really would be the ideal device to use (and better than the G-Bank) EXCEPT it has several minor and one major drawback.

First the minor:
It uses CF (CompactFlash) cards instead of the more ubiquitous SD cards. CF Cards are a little larger and a tad more expensive to buy.
Also, every game you want to play with the SuperCard has to be specially patched by their software, or it won't work. In other words, it's not as easy as drag and drop to the CF and you're done. You have to specify a list of games from within the patching application and it will output the patched games to the CF card (or any other location you specify).
Another thing is that saving games is not as straightforward as it should be. You still save games normally from within the game you're playing, but now there's the extra step of having to press a specific key combination in order to get that saved game actually written over to the CF Card. If you were to simply save your game and turn it off, you'd lose the save, since the save was only written to the Flash ROM and not the CF card.

And the one MAJOR drawback of the SuperCard:
Not all games work with it. Since each game has to be patched by their software before playing, it seems many games get broken in the process and either become unplayable or refuse to work at all. I've read alot about how they release new firmware updates to address some of the game compatibility issues, but the list of unsupported games is still pretty big. This is not like the G-Bank where all games are fully compatible and playable.

Of course, since I can no longer find the G-Bank for sale ANYWHERE on the internet, I might have no choice but to buy a SuperCard.
The http://www.divineo.cn link no longer even mentions the G-Bank at all. I still believe the G-Bank is the best way to go, and am looking desperately for a vendor that sells it.

Any of you guys have any ideas where I might be able to buy it?

#44467 - tepples - Thu Jun 02, 2005 2:59 am

vaevictus wrote:
How does [RAM] make [the SuperCard] less useful on a DS?

The code in the CF firmware that copies the game from the CF to the GBA is designed to run in GBA mode, not in Nintendo DS mode. By the time you load the DS program and power-cycle the system with a pass-through, the RAM will have decayed.

hmmm...

dragonmc wrote:
CF Cards are a little larger and a tad more expensive to buy.

Larger, yes. More expensive, not at the Wal-Mart store I visit. Remember that the SD spec is highly proprietary (due to the CPRM copy prevention circuitry), while CF is just plain old ATA in a different form factor and 3-5v spec.

Quote:
You have to specify a list of games from within the patching application and it will output the patched games to the CF card (or any other location you specify).

Any harder than making a PocketNES ROM or a GSM Player ROM?

Quote:
Another thing is that saving games is not as straightforward as it should be.

This could have been solved easily by putting a battery on the save-SRAM and then storing the savegame to CF on next boot. Would a battery have made it significantly bigger or more expensive?
_________________
-- Where is he?
-- Who?
-- You know, the human.
-- I think he moved to Tilwick.

#44516 - dragonmc - Thu Jun 02, 2005 1:28 pm

hmm...good points, especially about the patching. It really is not a whole lot different, and I guess its just a minor gripe, certainly nothing that would stop me from buying one to check it out, especially considering how cheap it is.

My main concern with it is the compatibility issue. It may be my perfectionist nature, but I find even if its true that 90% of games work on the SuperCard as many have stated, that's still not good enough for me. I mean, however small the dev is that you're working on or importing or whatever, you wanna make sure it works on the hardware right? But then again, I already have an EZ Flash Advance, and maybe I could use that for those few games that are not compatible.

Since it's improving though, I guess I'll give it a try.

#46577 - vaevictus - Mon Jun 27, 2005 4:35 pm

How about a flash button? (from a cordless phone even!)

You could retain power to the RAM, while recycling power to the CPU.

just a thought.
So far, my opinions aren't great... while it appears I can save all my files to the sd card and back to the onboard flash... I haven't had any luck with the save files ... if i move them off... they won't go back on correctly... and thus I don't have a save...
Fortunately ... I've just been playing the same game for a while... no big deal. :D
and I'm using my sd card for my camera. :D