Hacking Found a way to make a GBA Flashcart

[raystriker]

Hey tempers!!! I was just surfing the web and stumbled upon this page,
http://pokemonhackingclub.webs.com/apps/forums/topics/show/3031621
I shows how to make a Gba Flashcart
But has anyone tried it yet?

 

[FAST6191]

Surprisingly full instructions covering everything from PCB making upwards....
There have been various ones made in the past- http://www.ziegler.desaign.de/GBA/gba.htm#homebrew%20flash%20cart is pretty complete with the one you linked up being based on http://www.dl9sec.de/gbacart/gbacart.htm in particular.

The trouble with them is they tend to not be as good as the commercial ones- running a single GBA game and having it save is one thing but having multiple games on a cart*, extra features, having a nice means by which to program them (xboo cables are great but not really user friendly) and more (you linked to a pokemon site and the main reason any pokemon fan would want one is to have RTC which the EZ4 and 3 in 1 lack) takes actual effort to build up

*the two methods explored here are large NOR and large SRAM and the NOR/PSRAM/NAND flash combo.
Large NOR revolved around sticking things saves across the SRAM and accounting for it in patching (sometimes this and sometimes like what follows for NOR) and for the games themselves (which are hardcoded to run from a given location) was to have multiple pages of NOR and setting one of those to the ROM entry in hardware (you say start from page 2 and then point the game to run from it as a would when normally booting or do a hard reset and have it effectively do the same thing).

PSRAM and NOR carts might still have NOR handling (the EZ4 certainly does and the 3 in 1 did for a beta test at least) but they then have to be able to write things to the PSRAM, read from the NAND (SD or normal NAND chip) and handle saves usually by writing them back to the NAND next boot.

 

[Tom]

I would totally try this if my mom let me use the frying pan

 

[FAST6191]

For what it is worth if you have to buy in all the ferric chloride (although they seem to be opting for the HCl and peroxide approach.... nice if you can do it but not my favourite) and get it all sorted you might as well have used one of the cheap and cheerful send it away Chinese fabs- compared to 2004 when all these sorts of things were being cooked up they are an awful lot cheaper/more inclined towards one off pieces like this.

Also pro tip- try not to use your parent's cooking gear for science projects not to mention you can usually wander down to either a cheap shop or a charity shop/thrift store and score a fine pan for this- most modern pans have interesting coatings you probably do not want to be doing stuff like this on.

 

[Tom]

For what it is worth if you have to buy in all the ferric chloride (although they seem to be opting for the HCl and peroxide approach.... nice if you can do it but not my favourite) and get it all sorted you might as well have used one of the cheap and cheerful send it away Chinese fabs- compared to 2004 when all these sorts of things were being cooked up they are an awful lot cheaper/more inclined towards one off pieces like this.

Also pro tip- try not to your parent's cooking gear for science projects not to mention you can usually wander down to either a cheap shop or a charity shop/thrift store and score a fine pan for this- most modern pans have interesting coatings you probably do not want to be doing stuff like this on.

Hehe I don't usually go shopping at thrift stores haha a clean pcb shouldn't affect anything, for soldering like that the best thing to do is to tin the solder pads then add flux the chips and place them on the pads then heat the pan up I don't see an issue though except for some flux coming off onto the pan

 

[pyromaniac123]

Couldn't you just, I don't know, buy a commercial gba cart?

 

[Tom]

Couldn't you just, I don't know, buy a commercial gba cart?

Wheres the fun in that?