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Coding > Progmatically Opening and Reading GBA Cartridges?

#178455 - Cookie - Sun Aug 16, 2015 4:05 pm

So, I know GBA Cartridges are all "structured" differently, however I am wondering, does anyone know anywhere that I could find any resources that let me "open" a gba cartridge and dump what I can, like sprites or whatever, to save time instead of using VBA, or does this involve me having to Emulate the rom and dump it.


Basically:

1: C# Language.
2: Open ROM.
3: Dump Images & Sounds.
4: Convert To Correct Formats. (If Possible)


What I'd like:

1: Links to resources that make sense
2: Premade tutorials on this topic
3: Anything that can make this easy to do.

#178456 - gauauu - Mon Aug 17, 2015 3:58 pm

If you're just trying to extract images and sounds, it's going to be difficult without actually running the game, because, as you said, the assets aren't in a standard location (or might not necessarily even really be the exact same format, they could use different methodologies to write graphical data to vram).

If this is about legally dumping a cart, you could probably use the linker -> parallel port cable, and write a GBA program that lets you dump out the ROM data to your computer and save it. But that won't get you much beyond what's on rom file, other than legality.

Also, this forum is mostly about writing new code, we don't generally provide a lot of help/support with hacking commercial roms, which gets into the gray areas of legality that we try to avoid.

#178457 - Cookie - Tue Aug 18, 2015 4:49 am

Thanks for the help you gave, I understand about the legality issues, thanks anyway :) I'll have to do some of my own searching