Hacking Use of a Parallel to GBC cable?

[billzo]

I was going through a jumbled mess of cables a while back, and I managed to stumble upon this bad boy here. It's a Parallel to GBC (and I suppose GBA, too?) cable. It doesn't have any identifying logos or manufacturers' names on it.

Can anyone provide some insight on where this could have come from or what it is supposed to do??




Thanks!

Edit: As I understand it, there is the Xboo cable... But I've never owned one of those, nor am I sure that this actually even is that. It seems to predate the GBA though, and I have no idea how I could have possibly come to own this!

 

[Fishaman P]

They were never released branded to my knowledge, just homemade. They're known as Xboo cables, and they can be used to upload homebrew to a real GBA (possibly GBC too). Some emulators, including a specialized version of VBA, allow link cable emulation with a real console, which for one greatly simplifies emulator <-> console Pokemon trading.

 

[billzo]

You beat me to my edit. So... this is an Xboo cable? I'll have to fire up an XP rig with a parallel port and try it out. I guess that's a neat find considering I never bought one... o.O

 

[JLsoft]

If it had purple-ish casing and cord coating, it would be a Mad Catz PC Camera Link (you'd 'print' from the Game Boy Camera and the PC would capture the output, essentially downloading the pictures from the GB), but it looks translucent black/smoke-y in your pic, and it looks manufactured (so not a homemade GBCam cable), so no idea, sorry :/

 

[assassinz]

Could be for the Gameshark.
http://m.ebay.com/itm/121660954991?nav=SEARCH

 

[cracker]

It could also be from a cheat cart or a memory management cart. There is a good possibility they will work for more than one use.

 

[billzo]

Could be for the Gameshark.
http://m.ebay.com/itm/121660954991?nav=SEARCH

That's definitely it. I guess it must have come with a Gameshark, but I'll still try it as an Xboo cable

Thanks, all!

 

[cracker]

Going by pinouts I found pins 3 and 6 of the Gameshark cable aren't even wired. Be sure to let us know if it works or not.

 

[Chupi]

I can confirm that is a GameShark GBC cable. It will connect a PC to a GBC GameShark through the GBC linkport to transfer snapshots. It will NOT work with the usual Xboo DOS software or NO$GBA's Xboo multiboot feature. If I'm remembering right, its pinout is very, very close to the Xboo's and it could definitely be used if the software supported it.

Note that multibooting a GBA from a PC isn't generally all that useful. You can't use it as an alternative to a flashcart like EZF4. It only runs ROMs under 256 KB that are specially compiled for booting this way. Some homebrew supports it. It's useful for quickly testing stuff you're developing. It can be used with a certain special homebrew program to dump and restore saves to/from PC, though that's pretty much outmoded by the much more convenient GBA Save Manager DS homebrew and a Slot 1 card.

I have a mostly-complete program I wrote a long while back that does GBA multiboot using those cables, though the timing definitely needs some tweaking. I can try to fix the timing and release it sometime if anyone cares about this sort of thing anymore.

 

[billzo]

I'm pretty sure there will always be people interested in this sort of thing I'd love to have the program (especially the source, if you wouldn't mind :3) if you ever get around to it.

Thanks a lot for the information and saving me the time and frustration of discovering this myself!