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[onekelly]

The point of this topic is to find out how good the sc is for playing gba roms. And playing is ok but saving sucks on how it works, especially if a child or younger person is using it. The carts with onboard memory generally perfom better than the sc with gba roms. And to the size of the carts, doesn't really matter as the gba roms are smaller, generally. My daughters xrom512 is actually 64mb, but plays most gba roms flawlessly and saves exactly like the real carts. It even plays goomba very well. and holds about 8-12 games (not including the goomba multi-rom).

You may want to look at this thread for ideas on purchasing a gba solution as it was posted a year ago but has valid info in it.

http://www.scdev.org/forum/index.php?topic=6511.0



You may want to look at the NEW elink, appears to be around $30US.

Quote from Shaunj66 at gbatemp http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=62460&st=0

It's been a while since we've received a sample GBA flash kit. The ELINK flash kit is a dedicated Game Boy Advance flash kit which means absolutely zero official support for Nintendo DS games. The cart comes in 512Mb (64MB) or 1Gb (128MB) sizes and is connected to your PC via a mini (and non-standard) USB cable.

The build quality of the device is fairly good. The cart comes in a bright green colour and the mini USB connector doesn't affect the size of the casing and also feels quite sturdy. The cart looks and feels very much like the original EFA Linker.

The flash kit comes in a nice gift type box which has a cardboard sleeve and a nice book-type interior. Included is a small instruction leaflet, CD-ROM, USB cable and of course, GBA cart.

The device requires itself to be inserted into a powered-on GBA or DS (in GBA mode) whilst connected to the PC, which feels like a bit of a drawback when the EFA-Linker which connected in the same way didn't need to be.

The cart is not "drag and drop". It does not appear as a U-DISK device. Instead you must install the ELINK driver and use their client software. The write times aren't the fastest we've seen, with the average write speed at approximately 177KB/s.

The software is straight forward with just 3 main buttons 'Add File' 'Start Burn' and 'Clean All'. You get to customise advanced options when adding ROMs such as cheat codes (which are already available for the majority of games) and soft-reset. You can also customise the name of each game shown in the loader. You can also write and backup save game (.sav) files.

The boot loader is straight forward and void of any additional options or features. You can't seem to customise the boot loader at this point in time.

The kit is priced at around 30USD or 19GBP which is quite cheap.

We'll have a review up shortly. In the mean time feel free to ask any questions you may have.

It is said to be able to use visualboy advance saves from a post of the elink team in the thread.

[paul3100]

Well as i said i recommend the supercard lite with its on board memory, 2 gig max SD storage.

Great for GBA games and i have never found a problem with saving games, admitidly i don't play too many gba games but the ones i have all worked perfectly!. Found perhaps 7 or 8 games that i couldn't get to run but that was after testing couple of 100.

Besides the supercard team are the best for support in my opinion and there is all of us at the forum to help

paul

[Miggs]

Looks like this is where a ds gba emulator would be handy.
I think it would be able to do it since its a gba with another processor, I'm sure there's a way to get the ds to set its display in pure gba mode, but still be a ds. The menu could exist in the screensize just fine, sure it wont be able to fit as many items per page of a list, but it'll still be functional.

There would need to be something for converting the interpretation of the gba code to make it display correctly for one, and for any known differences between the ds's arm7's registers and the original gba's in ds mode. Everyone is going to say it isn't possible, but I think it would, it probably might not be simple to totally figure out though. Sure would help the gba's situation out though, essentially, gba mode itself would likely no longer even be needed outside of firmware updates and possibly emulators but I wonder if emulating them in a dsgba emulator would work better and have saves work, which it should be able to do especially without having to manually tell it to write the battery data to the card, or having to stop to do it. Might be able to even get states out of it. Theoretically, there's an extra processor to work with while the other one behaves as a gba, so there should be no slowdowns at all, but thats assuming getting arm7 to be a literal gba in ds mode is easy or possible, I'm pretty sure it behaves differently than if it were in actual gba mode.

[dantheman]

Quoting a post I made at another forum rather than retyping it all:

GBA games are directly addressed, that is, most data is read directly from the cartridge rather than from RAM. The DS slot is not capable of this method, as it loads chunks of the game into RAM, where it is then run. DimensionT is right in that DS games are streamed from the card in a sense, but GBA games function differently. So you can't run GBA games directly from slot-1.

You can't just use the ARM7 to emulate/simulate the GBA because it functions entirely differently in DS mode than it does in GBA mode. While in GBA mode it handles everything, in DS mode it only handles some buttons, touchscreen, wifi, and power management (among other functions of course). There are functions the ARM7 can handle in GBA mode that are inaccessible in DS mode. So therefore, you can't run GBA games in DS mode at all.

As a result, one must conclude that GBA games must run in GBA mode on the DS. Then the question comes up of where you're going to store the data for the GBA to use. You can't just load up the DS's 4 MB of RAM with GBA game data and then boot into GBA mode, as the DS's RAM is cleared and becomes inaccessible when you go into GBA mode. You can't just load up the GBA's 256 KB of RAM with a multiboot homebrew demo and then boot into GBA mode because the GBA's RAM is cleared by the GBA's BIOS when it runs. So therefore, it's not possible to store the game into on-board RAM before execution.

The only other way to get a GBA game working on the DS without a slot-2 device would be an emulator, and nobody is going to write a software renderer that would be slow and buggy when the DS already contains 100% accurate hardware emulation as it is. It would be a waste of time.

[Devil_Spawn]

or, to summarise, even if there was a ds gba emulator, it wouldnt speed up the supercards ram, so the slowdown would still be there. the only exception is a game under 4mb or less that could be stored in the ds's internal ram.

[Woot]

what the hell? this thing sucks!

i had a flash card for my gameboy advance, like 6 years ago, and it ran every GBA game perfectly. so now i have a DS i thought i'd buy a GBA card for it. so after getting my supercard lite, i first tried mario advance 4. didn't work. then i tried street fighter revival, it slows down almost to a stop and vertical sync is terrible. then i tried contra 3, slows down badly as well. that's like 2 of my favourite games crossed off the list.

does anyone know of a proper DS lite sized cart that can actually play GBA games properly?

[dantheman]

Sorry to say it, but you should have done your research before buying.  The older flash carts ran at 100% because they used NOR flash, which is very slow to write to but incredibly fast to read from.  The SD card used in your Supercard is NAND memory and is not fast enough to play GBA games from, so the Supercard copies the game into faster RAM for execution.  However, the Supercard's RAM is cheaper and slower than what is actually necessary.  Most games run fine, but some slow down, as you've experienced.  A better explanation and a couple workarounds can be found at http://wiki.pocketheaven.com/SupercardGBASlowdowns

For other devices, the guys at GBAtemp swear by the EZ-Flash III and IV, but I don't have any experience with them.  Another option is the M3 Perfect, which is more expensive than the Supercard but contains faster RAM so games won't slow down.

[Woot]

hey man, thanks for the reply. you're absolutely right. i bought it much too soon without doing the research. for some reason i always buy anxiously, then end up reading comprehensively about the whole subject after i've bought (usually) the wrong thing.

anyways i've bought, (what i should have done before, i think?  :/ ) an ezflash 3 in 1 cart. i'd be willing to sell the supercard in the UK for about £20. boy, am i glad i happened upon the R4 first as a slot 1 solution!

[dantheman]

If you're getting the R4 as well, then yes the 3in1 will work fine.  If you aren't getting a slot-1 device though, the 3in1 should be avoided, as it requires a slot-1 device to flash games to it.

Feel free to use our Marketplace section to sell your Supercard, or you could try talking to your friends to see if they're interested.  Just don't use eBay, as they'll take the auction down fairly quickly.