R4 (Upgraded Revolution) for GBA SP

[ammaralidj]

Hi there

I have used many R4 cards with several DSi and 3ds systems but i didn't know that there is R4 for GBA SP exists. Today i got my hands on R4 for GBA SP but i am not able to find its firmware. I have searched many websites but failed.
Please help me to find its firmware. You are my last hope. Please help

 

[Technicmaster0]

Can you take a picture of the other side of the PCB? The top one doesn't look like a proper cartridge because there are no ICs or similar things on the PCB.

 

[Localhorst86]

does the GBA display anthing when you turn it on with this cartridge inserted? Do you see the "Nintendo" logo on the bottom of the gameboy splashscreen?

 

[ammaralidj]

Can you take a picture of the other side of the PCB? The top one doesn't look like a proper cartridge because there are no ICs or similar things on the PCB.

Sorry sorry for the late reply. There is no IC or similar thing on both sides. Pictures attached.

does the GBA display anthing when you turn it on with this cartridge inserted? Do you see the "Nintendo" logo on the bottom of the gameboy splashscreen?

Nothing happened. Just the normal splash screen. May be something happened if i found the firmware files

 

[SylverReZ]

It's possible that this was likely an adapter for DS homebrew, which take advantage of the GBA slot as a secondary storage device.

 

[soulpower11]

someone else on reddit have it too

 

[ammaralidj]

someone else on reddit have it too

Yes i saw that post. But nothing useful

Post automatically merged: Jul 6, 2024

It's possible that this was likely an adapter for DS homebrew, which take advantage of the GBA slot as a secondary storage device.

I tried it on Ds lite but nothing happened and nothing on the menu. May be after copy firmware on the SDCard, it will work.

 

[Technicmaster0]

This won't work as GBA cartridge because it has no logic for it. It may have been used for extra storage or data transfer, but not as a standalone flashcart or something similar.

 

[ammaralidj]

This won't work as GBA cartridge because it has no logic for it. It may have been used for extra storage or data transfer, but not as a standalone flashcart or something similar.

But R4 is mentioned on it, and the R4 is supposed for running games. But may be you are right because there is not firmware fikes are available on internet.

 

[SylverReZ]

But R4 is mentioned on it, and the R4 is supposed for running games. But may be you are right because there is not firmware fikes are available on internet.

Just because it has R4 mentioned on the cartridge, doesn't mean it was officially made by the R4 team. Compare that to many fake cards worldwide.

 

[Apache Thunder]

What in god's name is this abomination? Where did you find this? Did you take a stop in a pocket dimension/alternate timeline to find this or something? Always thought of R4 as a DS thing so to see their branding on a GBA cart seems ... wrong ...

In all seriousness this is likely some kind of slot-2 storage for running DS games and probably used a special passme bootloader card for slot-1. Without that card you can't do anything with this unless someone manages to dig up a dldi driver so you can use your own homebrew with it. It's certainly odd indeed and the Gameboy SP is probably just non sense jargon that some clone makers like to add to their carts like "Wifi upgrade", "dual core", etc that slot-1 clone makers liked to add so I doubt this is intended for a GBA and is a DS exclusive product.

odd that it doesn't even show up as option pak on DS. Going by your photos it's probably due to how dirty/corroded those contacts look. Try giving it a clean. Not that it will help you in the end though as I mentioned above it required some long lost slot-1 companion card of some kind. This was not meant to be used on it's own.

 

[Bovrillor]

I've got one of these. It is an expansion for the early "Supercard" flashcart for DS. It allowed you to boot gba mode software from the Slot-1

It has no functionality without a Supercard that I'm aware of. R4 didn't have their own slot-1 card when they released this iirc

 

[Apache Thunder]

I've got one of these. It is an expansion for the early "Supercard" flashcart for DS. It allowed you to boot gba mode software from the Slot-1

It has no functionality without a Supercard that I'm aware of. R4 didn't have their own slot-1 card when they released this iirc

I think you mean to say DS mode software? Slot-1 is not accessible in GBA mode and you can't run GBA games in DS mode. There is GBARunner2 but note that was not a thing back then when this came out.

Maybe this operated as memory expansion so you could "extend" how many games you have access to. This was probably made around the time DS flashcards didn't have SDHC support and perhaps was cheaper to just have a second 2GB SD card instead of another MicroSD card. They were probably pretty expensive back then and fullsize SD cards were a bit cheaper.

There is no hardware on this slot-2 device to allow proper emulation of GBA rom seeing as how simple the PCB is in the photos we have of it. SD cards requires specific commands and timings that GBA/DS was not setup for hence why GBA flashcarts that do have MicroSD slots use a separate flash chip to store part of their boot software which loads said game into a ram chip.

 

[Jayro]

I've got one of these. It is an expansion for the early "Supercard" flashcart for DS. It allowed you to boot gba mode software from the Slot-1

It has no functionality without a Supercard that I'm aware of. R4 didn't have their own slot-1 card when they released this iirc

I was under the impression this was to boot Slot-1 software from Slot-2... Many GBA carts of the era had this as a feature.

 

[SylverReZ]

I was under the impression this was to boot Slot-1 software from Slot-2... Many GBA carts of the era had this as a feature.

There are some homebrews that use slot-2 as external media.

 

[Deleted member 702243]

Wouldn't have been bad for early media players to be able to play music files from sd card without having to worry about flashcart-specific dldi, if this just mounts sd card directly to the gba slot pins. No matter which ds flashcart you ran the software on it would be the same code/same method for accessing the sd in slot 2

Though I don't know how fast read speeds would be, for reading an sd card through gba slot in that way, and you'd basically need to include an entire sd card driver in the software to be able to read from it, which is not completely impossible I suppose

Or maybe it's nothing to do with dldi mess, but more so relevant to the times when storage size on slot 1 cards was limited, you could bypass storage size limits by having media on a larger sd card in slot 2 instead

Whatever this is and however it was used, this probably never left chinese/russian markets. They probably had a bunch of their own stuff in their own communities online, that we wouldn't have heard of just because of the language barrier, and that we mostly tend to stay within our own communities and the exchange of information doesnt always happen between different language/country communities (especially with chinese internet being very closed off/separate to begin with, most don't really go outside of it)

 

[Bovrillor]

I think you mean to say DS mode software? Slot-1 is not accessible in GBA mode and you can't run GBA games in DS mode. There is GBARunner2 but note that was not a thing back then when this came out.

Maybe this operated as memory expansion so you could "extend" how many games you have access to. This was probably made around the time DS flashcards didn't have SDHC support and perhaps was cheaper to just have a second 2GB SD card instead of another MicroSD card. They were probably pretty expensive back then and fullsize SD cards were a bit cheaper.

There is no hardware on this slot-2 device to allow proper emulation of GBA rom seeing as how simple the PCB is in the photos we have of it. SD cards requires specific commands and timings that GBA/DS was not setup for hence why GBA flashcarts that do have MicroSD slots use a separate flash chip to store part of their boot software which loads said game into a ram chip.

Whoops, I've got it mixed up with the EZflash-V ; just found mine in a drawer. Weird illogical hardware playing tricks on decade-old memories. My bad.

The Supercard (or later, R4) would copy a single GBA ROM into the Ezflash and then reboot in GBA mode. That's what my addled brain was trying to convey.

Not particularly relevant to this monstrosity though. It just effed up my brain.

 

[Apache Thunder]

Whoops, I've got it mixed up with the EZflash-V ; just found mine in a drawer. Weird illogical hardware playing tricks on decade-old memories. My bad.

The Supercard (or later, R4) would copy a single GBA ROM into the Ezflash and then reboot in GBA mode. That's what my addled brain was trying to convey.

Not particularly relevant to this monstrosity though. It just effed up my brain.

Yeah the EZFlash 3in1 I think did something like that. Some EZFlashV slot-1 cards came with one and would send a GBA rom to either PSRAM on the slot-1 card or if the game was 32MB in size, it would send it to norflash which is a non volatile flash chip used for running a GBA game from. The card basically turns into that case and you can boot it without the EZFlashV slot-1 card by just selecting it in the DS Firmware menu. It's only the PSRAM mode that requires a slot-1 card to send a rom into everytime.