Hardware What to do with Shovelware games

[Antiheld]

Hi there,

last year I bought some GBA SP AGS101 from flea markets, Facebook groups etc.

In Europe the cheapest AGS101 to find, usually is the pink one. Since the pink one often belonged to little girls I often bought them with shovelware titles. Many licenced games and many animal- espacially pony themed games.

Nobody wants to buy these games for a price which is worth the effort of selling them. Therefore I thought of using them another way.

Is there any kind of thing such useless games are usefull in the modding szene?

I thought for example of making my own Mother 3 Repro cartrdige. How hard is that? What do I need for that? Is there any tutorial online?

 

[FAST6191]

We have seen some of the repros coming out of somewhere do that, which is to say remove the ROM chip and put a new compatible chip on a little kind of breakout board. If you were thinking something like http://reinerziegler.de/readplus.htm#Home made carts but for the GBA then there are not tutorials or even vague discussions of how you might set about it that I have seen.

So no, afraid not. The only real use for most such things that people have are for shells if they get another game with a broken one or get a DS lite flash cart that needs a full size shell, of which there are none right now I would suggest for a GBA.
That or learn to love Bibi Blocksberg.

 

[Antiheld]

Thank you very much.

I've seen some Mother 3 cartridges, how are they made?

 

[FAST6191]

Usually one of three ways, though I have not looked specifically into the Mother 3 repro stuff as much as general repros and fakes.

1) The EZ3 in 1 GBA slot flash cart. Flashed with a single ROM and it is called a day. It will boot on the GBA and look like a normal ROM, at least until the battery breaks. So much of this happened (and apparently they were also a good source of chips for some robot makers or something) that GBA sized 3 in 1 flash carts are quite rare and expensive today. Some of the more advanced repros/fakes will lift or clip or otherwise remove the write enable pin so the would be user can not overwrite the game with a 3 in 1 fiddling program. It would be possible to have some real fun and cram a 3 in 1 lite size PCB into a normal case but that is probably more hassle than it is worth.
I guess someone could also do this with other NOR based flash carts too but I have not seen that in the wild.

2) The adapt as GBA board stuff I mentioned. Alas while I can link that GBC link and probably find some stuff from the NES and SNES world that do similarly I have next to no info here other than what I have figured out from pictures people have shown.

3) Full custom board from the ground up. There are a bunch that people have made for various homebrew programs ( http://www.qwak.co.uk/pages/gba/buy.php ), stuff like http://bennvenn.myshopify.com/collections/frontpage/products/gba-flash-cart , one more for the road http://2004mbit.gbadev.org/ and I guess there are some very wonky homebrew carts ( http://reinerziegler.de/GBA/gba.htm#homebrew flash cart ).