SuperFW: a custom firmware for Supercard

[Gamemaster2022]

I was suspecting the ERAM chip too, all of the non working agb i have all have larger chip but the one with smaller chip have broken cart slot so i couldn't test things out. Maybe some person who have working agb should mention their chip brand here too if possible. I wonder if we can somehow use SP ERAM on OG gba.

But GB Micro doesn't use ERAM chip as i know (i may be wrong) and it works on it.

Size of the chip does not really matter. It has the same capacity. I own two GBAs. One of them has the smaller chip and the other has the full sized one. Both have the same glitches and same games do not work. I have also noticed that the other SC firmware (SCFW) sometimes has garbled names of files and some of them are even missing on the OG GBA. On SP all works fine.

We can do a quick test. Let me know what happens if you try to run Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced. In my case, I get a black screen with music playing in the background. It will stay like that. This also happens on the GB Player.

Now... if all original GBAs have the same glitches including the GB Player, and all have the 128 pin CPU, could it actually be the CPU, not RAM? I mean it could even be both.

Edit: Pinouts for both CPUs: https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek-pinouts-cpu-pinouts.htm

 

[Tsila]

Size of the chip does not really matter. It has the same capacity. I own two GBAs. One of them has the smaller chip and the other has the full sized one. Both have the same glitches and same games do not work. I have also noticed that the other SC firmware (SCFW) sometimes has garbled names of files and some of them are even missing on the OG GBA. On SP all works fine.

We can do a quick test. Let me know what happens if you try to run Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced. In my case, I get a black screen with music playing in the background. It will stay like that. This also happens on the GB Player.

Now... if all original GBAs have the same glitches including the GB Player, and all have the 128 pin CPU, could it actually be the CPU, not RAM? I mean it could even be both.

Edit: Pinouts for both CPUs: https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek-pinouts-cpu-pinouts.htm

Tried the crash bandicoot rom and yes it stay on black screen after logo andmusic playing forever. But if it's CPU, why some OG GBA works, i really want others who have a working one to check their CPU/EWRAM chip so we can have a list and maybe find some clues.

Strangely, tested on my AGB-CPU-10 numbered "10 1-1" on the back, it works great. I'll begin disassembling it and see what's the diff apart from it's a 32pin one

 

[Gamemaster2022]

Tried the crash bandicoot rom and yes it stay on black screen after logo andmusic playing forever. But if it's CPU, why some OG GBA works, i really want others who have a working one to check their CPU/EWRAM chip so we can have a list and maybe find some clues.

Strangely, tested on my AGB-CPU-10 numbered "10 1-1" on the back, it works great. I'll begin disassembling it and see what's the diff apart from it's a 32pin one

Very interesting. Let us know what you find.

To help with the list, I tested it on GBAs with these motherboard revisions:

1. GBA - 10 8-2
2. GBA - 02 8-2

 

[blckbear]

Size of the chip does not really matter. It has the same capacity. I own two GBAs. One of them has the smaller chip and the other has the full sized one. Both have the same glitches and same games do not work. I have also noticed that the other SC firmware (SCFW) sometimes has garbled names of files and some of them are even missing on the OG GBA. On SP all works fine.

We can do a quick test. Let me know what happens if you try to run Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced. In my case, I get a black screen with music playing in the background. It will stay like that. This also happens on the GB Player.

Now... if all original GBAs have the same glitches including the GB Player, and all have the 128 pin CPU, could it actually be the CPU, not RAM? I mean it could even be both.

Edit: Pinouts for both CPUs: https://problemkaputt.de/gbatek-pinouts-cpu-pinouts.htm

Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced loads fine on my AGB-001 (10-1-1 revision) with IGM disabled on SuperFW v0.12 and v0.15. With IGM enabled black screen with no sound.

 

[Gamemaster2022]

Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced loads fine on my AGB-001 (10-1-1 revision) with IGM disabled on SuperFW v0.12 and v0.15. With IGM enabled black screen with no sound.

In my case it's always either a black screen with or without music in the background. Once I got a white screen with GFX(?) crash

10 8-2: Black screen, no sound (IGM on + off)
02 8-2: Black screen, music in background / white GFX(?) crash screen (IGM on + off)

 

[sam2895]

Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced works fine on my Nds lite with igm it's also save and load normal no slowdown no graphic glitch (superfw 0.15)

 

[Tsila]

I found something strange. I tested on agb-cpu-10 and everything worked. Tested same setup but with two different agb-cpu-02 and same crash on games like white screen on boot. Tested same setup on agb-cpu-03 and everything worked too. Sometime one of my agb-cpu-02 load game fine like mario luigi superstar saga and sometime white screen. So maybe it's random or maybe EWRAM should be cleaned before writing and cleared after game loaded in SDRAM. Note all these gba work fine on stock firmware so there is some sort of trick to add on custom fw to make it work on all

Post automatically merged: May 14, 2025

@Gamemaster2022 can you confirm that your agb that have "CPU AGB A" doesn't work? I think that the problem is the cpu revision not motherboard. As i saw, my "CPU AGB A" with motherboard AGB-CPU-03 work fine and my "CPU AGB" with AGB-CPU-02 doesn't

 

[blckbear]

In my case it's always either a black screen with or without music in the background. Once I got a white screen with GFX(?) crash

10 8-2: Black screen, no sound (IGM on + off)
02 8-2: Black screen, music in background / white GFX(?) crash screen (IGM on + off)

Sometimes (but quite rare) some games load incorrectly for me, and quickly turning off and on the GBA and loading the same ROM makes them work. If I turn it off and wait before turning it on and loading the game again, it will still load incorrectly (it's weird how it is kinda consistent with that). Maybe try doing that, quickly rebooting and loading the same ROM after it gives you a black screen and see.

I'll take apart my GBA soon to clean the dust from the display and I'll check what memory and CPU do I have

 

[SooraMaru]

I just have one question, does this fw improve game loading? Because the supercard fw sucks.

 

[Peeteris]

I just have one question, does this fw improve game loading? Because the supercard fw sucks.

Yes

 

[Gamemaster2022]

I just have one question, does this fw improve game loading? Because the supercard fw sucks.

Yes and by a LOT. I was surprised. It's even better than with SCFW

 

[sam2895]

Yeah, all the thnx to genius @davidgf

 

[Gamemaster2022]

I found something strange. I tested on agb-cpu-10 and everything worked. Tested same setup but with two different agb-cpu-02 and same crash on games like white screen on boot. Tested same setup on agb-cpu-03 and everything worked too. Sometime one of my agb-cpu-02 load game fine like mario luigi superstar saga and sometime white screen. So maybe it's random or maybe EWRAM should be cleaned before writing and cleared after game loaded in SDRAM. Note all these gba work fine on stock firmware so there is some sort of trick to add on custom fw to make it work on all

Post automatically merged: May 14, 2025

@Gamemaster2022 can you confirm that your agb that have "CPU AGB A" doesn't work? I think that the problem is the cpu revision not motherboard. As i saw, my "CPU AGB A" with motherboard AGB-CPU-03 work fine and my "CPU AGB" with AGB-CPU-02 doesn't

I can confirm that the GBA with revision 10 8-2 has a "CPU AGB A" and the problems still occur. It has a NEC RAM chip.
The other GBA has an older motherboard with "CPU AGB", same problems. It also has a NEC RAM chip.

Same RAM, same problems. Something's fishy.....

I honestly think that it doesn't matter if it's only "CPU AGB" or "CPU AGB A" as the "A" chip is marked by that because SPs were already being made and so that they can easily distinguish which CPU is the 128 pin and which is the 156 pin one.

Edit: Attached photos of both motherboards

Post automatically merged: May 15, 2025

Crash Bandicoot 2 N-Tranced works fine on my Nds lite with igm it's also save and load normal no slowdown no graphic glitch (superfw 0.15)

Yes. DS has no problems with the SuperCard, just like the SPs. We are trying to find the cause of incompatibility issues with the original GBA and possibly a way to fix them

 

[Tsila]

I can confirm that the GBA with revision 10 8-2 has a "CPU AGB A" and the problems still occur. It has a NEC RAM chip.
The other GBA has an older motherboard with "CPU AGB", same problems. It also has a NEC RAM chip.

Same RAM, same problems. Something's fishy.....

I honestly think that it doesn't matter if it's only "CPU AGB" or "CPU AGB A" as the "A" chip is marked by that because SPs were already being made and so that they can easily distinguish which CPU is the 128 pin and which is the 156 pin one.

Edit: Attached photos of both motherboards

View attachment 504835View attachment 504836

Post automatically merged: May 15, 2025

Yes. DS has no problems with the SuperCard, just like the SPs. We are trying to find the cause of incompatibility issues with the original GBA and possibly a way to fix them

The agb-cpu-003 here works fine and it have NEC ram and CPU AGB A cpu. So we can rule out the ram and cpu chip problem?

Also notice that some revisions don't use AGB-REG chip wich i assume is integrated in the cpu soc on later model

 

[Gamemaster2022]

The agb-cpu-003 here works fine and it have NEC ram and CPU AGB A cpu. So we can rule out the ram and cpu chip problem?

Also notice that some revisions don't use AGB-REG chip wich i assume is integrated in the cpu soc on later model

I suppose we can...

It's true that I have noticed that my second SC has different glitches than the other one. Which is weird as both carts have the same hardware. But what is it really causing it then?

Now we also know the games have to be patched with waitstate and layout patches for the slow SDRAM chip. It must be them then. Something is making the games unstable on the original GBA's hardware.

Post automatically merged: May 15, 2025

The agb-cpu-003 here works fine and it have NEC ram and CPU AGB A cpu. So we can rule out the ram and cpu chip problem?

Also notice that some revisions don't use AGB-REG chip wich i assume is integrated in the cpu soc on later model

Question - is any of your GBAs modded with li-ion battery mod?

 

[Tsila]

I suppose we can...

It's true that I have noticed that my second SC has different glitches than the other one. Which is weird as both carts have the same hardware. But what is it really causing it then?

Now we also know the games have to be patched with waitstate and layout patches for the slow SDRAM chip. It must be them then. Something is making the games unstable on the original GBA's hardware.

Post automatically merged: May 15, 2025

Question - is any of your GBAs modded with li-ion battery mod?

Yes, mine have li ion mod. Tested on 3.3v directly from an arduino but got same result

 

[0koren]

On the latest master with EWRAM overlock, auto patch and fast loading I have much much less white screens and I am able to consistently load games that were failing before, on AGB-001 (IPS mod, Nimh batteries)

 

[Xyvir]

My agb seems to work fine with supercard and superFW fwiw, no mods

 

[Sakitoshi]

My agb seems to work fine with supercard and superFW fwiw, no mods

we have come to the conclusion that agb with "CPU AGB A" generally work fine with the supercard.
this has not been 100% proven and i've seen reports of users claiming that it doesn't work well on their gameboy player, when, for what i can gather, all gameboy player's have "CPU AGB A" with later models having "CPU AGB A E".
sp's use "CPU AGB B" or "CPU AGB B E" and micro's use "CPU AGB E".
no idea what nds use but doesn't matter, from sp onwards they are all confirmed working.

for the record i have 2 og gba and one of them is affected and the other is fine. the one affected has "CPU AGB" and the working one is "CPU AGB A".

 

[davidgf]

Hey there!
In the meantime while we try to fix some of these pesky issues with older models... just released version 0.16!

This version has:
- Support for Supercard Lite! (works in GBA and NDS mode ofc).
- Added EWRAM overclocking.
- More misc stuff like more translations, emulators, etc.

Enjoy!