Just put it in a root of your SD card and hold R while powering on GBA.
So the compatibility of everdrive GBA is near perfect , better even than the EZ FLASH 4?GBA patching works by searching the entire game for SRAM, EEPROM or Flash. Following that there are some numbers to tell the sub type and then you patch from there using premade patches to turn the game into an SRAM saving game. There is no indication in the header of what save type nor where the information on it is is found, and as far as I am aware there are no tricks like you have for finding the binary and it is basically completely random where it appears in the ROM. Not hard to do on a PC but on a 16MHz ARM7 with less than 300KB of RAM it is a bigger ask, especially if you have to also scan through the bus or something. To that end the two main ways of doing it in hardware (like those seen on the DS with the expansion packs, the DS is more powerful than the GBA but not amazingly so) are you scan the ROM once and when it is found you note the offset location of the save data for future use, or you make your own database of every game, and you possibly also have a manual setting mode to force it.
Equally as far as I am aware the everdrive actually emulates the save types in hardware rather than patching them to be SRAM like every other GBA cart out there.
As far as making saves then it should do it but if you want to make your own that might be an idea for a while -- editing files on a SD card is fairly easy but creating new ones can be slightly tricky and has tripped up many homebrew coders over the years, including the EZTeam.
I was mainly being cute and was curious as to how large such a database would be. They have kicked things to external files before though, and it already uses a variation on GBFS if memory serves so it would not be too hard to do that rather than having to recompile every time for an incbin type method.
Likewise the images are compressed if memory serves, I certainly recall pulling a version of GBAcrusher ( http://members.iinet.net.au/~freeaxs/gbacomp/ )from various skin making tools when I have needed it for a ROM hack or something.
On Mario we tested things once and saving happened fine, however for whatever reason they only wrote the save back to the cart when the games used 8:3 naming.
ChuChu rocket is pretty much the only test I can really think of -- for some reason some save patching tends to make it boot to a ! on the screen, run it without save patching and it boots and plays just fine but saving can be tricky. I don't know what causes this but I suspect there is a line saying Flash or something somewhere else in the ROM and that confuses some of them.
Not sure about Italian vendors these days, https://www.gbarl.it/ might have some more info there. Europe in general is not so hot for them right now, and the usual standby for me of http://www.shop01media.com/en/EZ-Flash appears to be out of stock right now. Don't buy the EZ4 lite compact model as it is not for GBA games.
Cheapest is likely to be somewhere in Hong Kong, however that usually comes with the shipping being up there in the weeks.
The EZTeam have made EZ4s somewhat recently, I don't know when the most recent batch was made but 2015 they brought out the GBA size microSD model ( http://gbatemp.net/threads/new-ez4-sdhc-in-house-at-gbatemp.381182/ ) and apparently there was a new run of the 3 in 1 flash carts in 2016. Speaking of the 3 in 1 then they are for the DS and DS lite so if you have one of those and a DS flash cart you can get a 3 in 1 and use the DS cart manage it, it is not much cheaper than an EZ4 and I really do like having a standalone cart but if money is an issue for you then you can do that too.
The everdrive is the current king of the hill for GBA flash carts, however if you ask the question "Can I play near every GBA game just fine/as it would be originally on a GBA without too many hassles with the EZ4?" then the answer is yes, yes you can, hundreds before you have. I previously linked my list of trouble games and workarounds for them in the thread but have it again
http://gbatemp.net/threads/buying-a-gba-flash-cart-in-2013.341203/page-18#post-4756995
There is a vendor up on ebay in the UK selling the latest EZ Flash; they are called Levitech-Retail, and are selling m for about 24 euroes.
I bought mine there a few months back.
It has a real time clock built into the cart, the EZTeam dropped theirs after the EZ3 as so few games made use of it. You can still patch the clock so it advances during play time, just not during power off like the original game, it mostly only troubles the growing berries mechanic in pokemon ruby, sapphire and emerald). The everdrive may also have some patches built in for the classic nes and dragon ball z games (few games on the GBA have anything like anti piracy, those are two, both also solved or with superior methods if you want them) but I am not sure offhand.So the compatibility of everdrive GBA is near perfect , better even than the EZ FLASH 4?
WHAAAAAT tripp is this ?
A GBA Flashcard getting an update in 2017 ? Uff.
*needs to regather his breath*
... ok. I'm over it now.
Is the update only for the MicroSD versions of EZ IV Flash Cards?
I have the old MiniSD version and the updates seems to be ignored. I boot
straight into the menu.
1.78: 2.00:
32Mbit 16 seconds 28 seconds
64Mbit 25 seconds 57 seconds
128Mbit 52 seconds 115 seconds
Comparison of PSRAM loading times:
Code:1.78: 2.00: 32Mbit 16 seconds 28 seconds 64Mbit 25 seconds 57 seconds 128Mbit 52 seconds 115 seconds
As you can see, 2.00 is considerably slower in PSRAM Loading than 1.78
Yeah, me too. I am going to stay on/revert to 1.78 since my library is already patched anyways.Damn thats a significant bump, I'll probably stay on 1.78 then, ty good sir for the testing.
This is really a feature for new customers who are debating between this and the Everdrive, not old ones who have already gone through and patched their libraries.
I like the idea of drag and dropping clean ROMs, but not the longer loading times. Could the EZ4 not patch the game the first time its loaded, then write the patched version to the card, so it loads quickly next time?