I have been bitten by the Gameboy modding bug and now I have several working GBAs, so I was keen to try out the multiplayer games which I had missed back in the day. However, many of these physical carts (Doom and Doom II for instance) are crazy money these days. One inexpensive way around this is to resurrect long forgotten GBA-era flashcarts to easily get two copies of a game running at the same time.
I have tried various ways of getting my old F2A Ultra 256Mb back into action. I've compiled if2a for macOS (and tried a few forks with additional fixes), and built it for Linux too but it just seemed to time-out when trying to connect. I think it's because it's written for libusb 0.1 and perhaps the 1.0 > 0.1 compatibility shim package libusb-compat isn't perfect. Anyway - there seems to be no viable option other than installing a Windows XP VM and passing the USB device through to the VM. VirtualBox on macOS works fine for this, and it's free.
I found some old F2A drivers I had archived, but I couldn't really find much in the way of F2A software online. I have trawled the web archive of the official F2A site, and found a few scraps. Somehow on my search I found the motherlode though - and I can't even find it in my history to credit the source. It was very hard to find though, so I'm uploading here to keep this stuff safe. It was a big archive of stuff that was shared off a OneDrive link. It contains:
Anyway, hope this helps someone else. Multiplayer handheld Doom is worth the effort!
I have tried various ways of getting my old F2A Ultra 256Mb back into action. I've compiled if2a for macOS (and tried a few forks with additional fixes), and built it for Linux too but it just seemed to time-out when trying to connect. I think it's because it's written for libusb 0.1 and perhaps the 1.0 > 0.1 compatibility shim package libusb-compat isn't perfect. Anyway - there seems to be no viable option other than installing a Windows XP VM and passing the USB device through to the VM. VirtualBox on macOS works fine for this, and it's free.
I found some old F2A drivers I had archived, but I couldn't really find much in the way of F2A software online. I have trawled the web archive of the official F2A site, and found a few scraps. Somehow on my search I found the motherlode though - and I can't even find it in my history to credit the source. It was very hard to find though, so I'm uploading here to keep this stuff safe. It was a big archive of stuff that was shared off a OneDrive link. It contains:
- F2A PowerWriter 2.61 (the newest client software which includes the DieHard state saving and reverting for the F2A Ultra carts that have the two buttons)
- F2A Ultra User Guide
- F2A USB Driver install
- Windows ME & 98
- Windows Vista & 7 (hacked to work on Windows 7 32bit apparently)
- Windows XP
- F2A USB Writer v1.02
- GBA boot file 2.70 (provides the game switching menu and SRAM management)
- F2A Writer 3.1 (final release, send multiboot feature doesn't work)
- F2A Writer 3.0
- F2A Writer Readme
Anyway, hope this helps someone else. Multiplayer handheld Doom is worth the effort!
Last edited by patters,
