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Coding > GBA Files - Extracting from or multi-booting

#12000 - agentash - Sun Oct 26, 2003 12:33 pm

Hi,

Does anyone have any info on how I would go about booting a GBA ROM (*.GBA or *.BIN) from another (like a menu)?

Also, does anyone know about any ways of extracting assets from a GBA ROM (*.GBA or *.BIN)? What I would be after is getting the video from a ROM created by METEO video to GBA program.

Thanks for any advice,

Ash
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#12004 - ravenq - Sun Oct 26, 2003 4:22 pm

Hmm, I can't give any assurances on these answers at this point, but here goes anyway...

For something that loads roms from a menu, I suggest looking into something like Pogoshell. (Note that it doesn't work with EZF cards very well). Even if you can't use it directly, I'm pretty sure the source is available on sourceforge, so you could download it and see how it works.

As for extracting information from a ROM, try Zophar's Domain, they have a lot of tools to extract data from ROM images.

Sorry these aren't more concise, but hopefully they're a start.

Regards,
Tim Crockford
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#12011 - tepples - Sun Oct 26, 2003 6:55 pm

You can't boot one .gba program from within another .gba program unless either your cart has bankswitching support (F2A has it, EZF has it but we haven't figured it out yet, Wise Card and Nintendo official carts don't have it) or you use Pak Swapping. If you want to structure your program as a collection of separate executables, I'd suggest writing the program as a RAM-based (.mb) program.

If you're trying to extract video from a ROM produced by a proprietary codec, I'd suggest either licensing the technology for use in your own product or using a different codec.
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#12354 - agentash - Sat Nov 08, 2003 7:43 pm

Thanks for the tips. That is basically what I'm trying (the pogoshell thing.) At least I know I'm not missing out on something simple!

Use another codec... are there any codecs around that I can use for GBA then (apart from the ones that you have to pay a licence fee for... this is only a student project) where I wouldn't have to be extracting files?

Thanks again.
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