Hacking Issue with NOR on a new Ez Flash IV

FAST6191 · Feb 9, 2014

Sorry ghodan I have not been on my main machine much these last couple of days.
http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/f...ion-premade-loaders-ez42013norfix-f32647.html
^
I made a small bundle pack of three great skins

One was the vista you already saw

Another was the Carbon skin (Carbon version), if I had to have a favourite EZ4 skin this would probably be it.

The final one was clearlooks. As it does not feature the a DS skin in the download I had you now have Carbon - Carbon colours there.

For most these represent the big three of EZFlash skins. Personally I am really not seeing the somewhat intense dislike the star wars skin gets but I prefer playing with powertools and we otherwise already know about my inabilities to do more than replicate effects I see so that is not all unexpected really.

Carbon and vista have already been tested thanks to people on IRC, clearlooks has not but as I did nothing different to build it I would be shocked it if failed. Again it seems to work fine with cracker's EZSkinner and cory1492's tools that it acts as a frontend for. Some of Kuwanger's stuff for deeper mods of the skins may need to be fiddled with but that is a different thread (for the most part it should just be offsets that need changing rather than the underlying logic).
Bonus for forum searchers. If you somehow have something on the NOR and then you write an old build of a skin then there will likely be lots of junk, garbled text or crap in the NOR screen and nothing will work properly there.

If you get really bored do remember you can turn a lot of the EZ3 GBA skins, of which there were many fantastic ones made, into quite functional EZ4 skins with not a lot of effort (mainly just fi

Skyline969 · Feb 12, 2014

FAST6191 said:
Sorry ghodan I have not been on my main machine much these last couple of days.
http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/f...ion-premade-loaders-ez42013norfix-f32647.html
^
I made a small bundle pack of three great skins

One was the vista you already saw

Another was the Carbon skin (Carbon version), if I had to have a favourite EZ4 skin this would probably be it.

The final one was clearlooks. As it does not feature the a DS skin in the download I had you now have Carbon - Carbon colours there.

For most these represent the big three of EZFlash skins. Personally I am really not seeing the somewhat intense dislike the star wars skin gets but I prefer playing with powertools and we otherwise already know about my inabilities to do more than replicate effects I see so that is not all unexpected really.

Carbon and vista have already been tested thanks to people on IRC, clearlooks has not but as I did nothing different to build it I would be shocked it if failed. Again it seems to work fine with cracker's EZSkinner and cory1492's tools that it acts as a frontend for. Some of Kuwanger's stuff for deeper mods of the skins may need to be fiddled with but that is a different thread (for the most part it should just be offsets that need changing rather than the underlying logic).
Bonus for forum searchers. If you somehow have something on the NOR and then you write an old build of a skin then there will likely be lots of junk, garbled text or crap in the NOR screen and nothing will work properly there.

If you get really bored do remember you can turn a lot of the EZ3 GBA skins, of which there were many fantastic ones made, into quite functional EZ4 skins with not a lot of effort (mainly just fi

Just FYI, the Clearlooks theme in the pack that you posted has some transparency issues, and the font/translation is different. There's a lot of pink backgrounds where transparency should be.

The upside is that it seems to be working. It's definitely taking a lot longer than before anyway, so I'm assuming that it's working now.

EDIT: Confirming that it does, indeed, work. I ended up switching to the Carbon theme anyway and all is well. Thanks for all the hard work!

spencydoodle · Mar 3, 2014

None of these skins seem to be working for me! Maybe I'm doing something wrong with the update? I put the file on the root of the SD then hold R at startup. Is there anything else I need to do?
I managed to get it working once and have a file written to NOR, but I tried to change the skin to one of yours and now I cant write, delete, or format the NOR.
I've tried formatting the SD and every working skin to no avail. I don't know what else to try!

Any help would be appreciated!

FAST6191 · Mar 3, 2014

It may be that you have an older style cart/old stock instead of the more recent run. Have you tried one of the older skins? The bundled ezfla_up.bin from http://filetrip.net/nds-downloads/flashcart-files/download-ez4-client-2009-04-03-f31119.html should do as a test.

Failing that are you using a microSD to miniSD adapter? The contact issues they seem to have could cause similar things but more likely it is the need for the older style loader.

spencydoodle · Mar 3, 2014

Wow you reply quickly!

That didn't work either. I have a 2gb mini SD.
Since I've loaded that ezfla_up.bin you listed I now have many EZPDA.gba files and many blank folders listed in my NOR. I can't write or format the NOR. Changing the skin doesn't fix these files.
I figure I have a 2013 cart because I just got the thing.

spencer5976 · Mar 3, 2014

Try reformating the mini ms on your computer, it should be fat file system. Then try the ezfla_up.bin.

FAST6191 · Mar 3, 2014

The junk appearing on the NOR would seem to indicate it is one of the 2013 models -- another having issues also saw that when they went to an old firmware.

So it does this with the three firmwares I linked on filetrip and the confirmed working one from ezflash themselves ( http://www.ezflash.cn/zip/EZ4_2014.rar )?

spencydoodle · Mar 3, 2014

The files dissapeared when I formatted the SD and loaded the newest firware. But the NOR still doesnt function properly.
I tried all four skins. (Your 3 and the official, none worked.) Do I just have a bum NOR?

spencer5976 · Mar 3, 2014

See if #9 on this thread helps you.

spencydoodle · Mar 3, 2014

I've tried that. It doesn't help. I still have the super fast loading and other NOR problems.

spencydoodle · Mar 3, 2014

Well this is odd. I put my EZ Flash IV into my GBA SP instead of my GBA (custom backlit) and the NOR works fine! Any explination for this? Thanks for your help.

spencer5976 · Mar 3, 2014

Now if you put the EZ Flash IV in the modded gba does nor work? Can you play the game now on your modded gba?

spencydoodle · Mar 4, 2014

It still works in the modded GBA. I guess I'll just have to do all my NOR work on my SP and switch it over. At least I've found a temporary solution.
Thanks for your help! Time to begin Mother 3! :gba:

FAST6191 · Mar 4, 2014

That is odd.

It sounds like it could be dodgy connection on the pins, I had thought most of the memory shuffling was internal on the EZ4 but that could be wrong.

Clean the cart pins on the EZ4 (sometimes they still have a bit of something from manufacture) and if you can also clean the pins on your GBA (they are exposed and the at least the better part of a decade old at this point).

The other alternative would be something like if the modded GBA had the power rail of the cart (or shared one) tapped then between the extra of the EZ4, the light, the reading of SD and the writing of NOR something got a bit unstable; the GBA does use a nice 3.3V which should do well for a lot of LED strips. If you can disable the backlight then try with that.

invaderyoyo · Mar 18, 2014

Hey, I'd like to add that I got a modded backlit agb as well, from zerey, and mine would not play the ez flash iv at all. All I would get was a black screen. Any other gba game worked fine. I ended up switching the guts from another agb I had, pretty much defeating the purpose of buying it pre-modded, and now it plays perfectly.

I would also like to add that I also could not use the NOR when I first got the EZ flash iv, but I already knew about renaming the release.bin. The only thing is that I was stuck with that star wars theme, so thanks for posting those nicer ones.

Finally, I'd like to ask if there's any way to add the RESET patch? I can play Mother 3, but I can't play some other games like Yoshi's Island because this version does not reset after loading up a game. I'd take Mother 3 over Yoshi's Island any day, but it'd be nice to have both.

spencer5976 · Mar 18, 2014

http://filetrip.net/gba-downloads/c...-iv-1-720-reset-mother-3-skin-1-0-f24994.html

invaderyoyo · Mar 18, 2014

spencer5976 said:
http://filetrip.net/gba-downloads/c...-iv-1-720-reset-mother-3-skin-1-0-f24994.html

The ironic thing about the mother 3 skin is that I can't play mother 3 with it. I'll be able to play yoshi's island but not mother 3 because the ez flash iv I have won't let me use the NOR with that version.

FAST6191 · Mar 19, 2014

Reset should not really have any bearing on the GBA -- it was made to work around a DS mode loader bug.

Still if you find the game will not work with a soft reset launch then I can not remember the button combo offhand but it should be something like press L and A to launch it. The help menu on the first screen might well have the listing of commands like that.

invaderyoyo · Mar 19, 2014

I'm not sure I understand. With the Mother 3 skin the bios thing plays again whenever starting a game, and in turn Yoshi's Island plays fine, but the NOR doesn't work. With the renamed release.bin the NOR works, but the bios thing does not play again when starting a game, and in turn Yoshi's Island does not play. The screen just goes black and I can't do anything. Soft reset won't work. The default button combo is L + up + a + b.

FAST6191 · Mar 19, 2014

Sorry reset can be several subtly different things, I should also clear up the loaders and such first.

renamed release.bin
This is the new loader to use with the 2013 edition EZ4 that had a new NOR chip. So far there has been the original and those three I stuck in a bundle pack. Anybody can make more with the EZSkinner program though.

Prior to this most people used a hacked version of the original EZ4 loader done a person called Modulo. He made two hacked versions of the last loader, one was without the DS loader onboard (GBA skin only) and the other was the so called Reset loader.

The GBA only one does not work well with skinning tools so nobody really uses it. The Reset loader works around a bug with launching GBA games in DS mode. http://nocash.emubase.de/gbatek.htm#dsbackwardscompatiblegbamode has more on the bug that happened, some people went back to the version released before the EZ4 lite compact and lite deluxe which is where the bug crept in but that will also not speak to the 2013 edition NOR.

Anyway theoretically to launch a GBA game once the menu has booted you just need to stick it in the NOR/PSRAM, set the NOR/PSRAM to appear as the cart and then branch to the location of do a soft reset. This is known as a soft launch, its main benefit is saving a few seconds watching the GBA logo happen again though it also had implications for certain features and compatibility for some games.
The alternative is to also set the NOR/PSRAM to appear as the GBA cart and then do a hard reset (the GBA has this feature onboard), some games respond better to this.

http://nocash.emubase.de/gbatek.htm#biosresetfunctions has more on the different resets if you are curious.

Modulo's reset loader forced every boot to be the hard reset boot. Previously the standard soft boot was the norm though that could vary between loaders and how much patching the EZTeam did.

As the EZTeam would not have used Modulo's hack as the base for their new 2013 loader the boot method would be back on soft boot. However you can select this in the menu with a certain button combo, now I am back with my GBA in reach I can test it and it seems to be hold L and press A in the GBA loader to force a soft reset boot. It might have changed for you though.

The "Soft reset" that you speak of is another thing entirely. It is an extra feature, one I tend not to see the need of but to each their own here, that allows people to reset at any point in the game by pressing a button combo. It falls under the same umbrella as cheats, sleep mode and all the other nice functions that various GBA and DS flash carts might sport.

Hacking Issue with NOR on a new Ez Flash IV

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