Hacking EZ-Flash IV clarifications

[yellowsnowcone]

Hi there, first post. Most of what I wanted to know I could find, but not answers to these specific questions for the EZ-Flash IV (phat). They may have been answered, but if so, I do not have the required knowledge to fully understand the answers I have read, having no experience yet with slot-2 carts. I intend to pair it with an Acekard 2i.

1. With an image on the flash, can I reboot for saving, load others into the PSRAM, then go back to using the program residing in flash, including saves, without doing any new writing to the flash?

2. Following from the first question, assuming it is a yes, will I need to manually get saves off before writing to PSRAM, which I assume I can do using GBA ExpLoader, or will a boot to the GBA cart take care of that?

3. Since the internal battery may die during its service life, is it a primary?

 

[FAST6191]

For what it is worth there is no great need to pair it (as in have something on the ak2i) to use the EZ4- it is quite happy as a standalone device and indeed even among those programs that do support it there is a list of caveats several lines long (first and foremost is do not use them to write to the EZ4 NOR). If you have flashme on your DS you can force a boot to a device quite easily (depending upon the version you install you press a button combination or it will autoboot the EZ4 if you prefer) and I am not sure what goes with software these days but there were reset tools back when.

1. By flash do you mean the NOR section. If so yeah that is one of the main things it does.

2. If using the EZ4's inbuilt menus it handles it all by itself.

3. I believe some of the later ones are non rechargeable and the older ones that were rechargeable did not have much/anything in the way of overcharge protection (not that you could do much without a linker). Provided it can match the voltage and max current draw (although in practice it probably draws a lot less but let us not go there) and fits in the cart it does not really matter.

 

[Deleted-236924]

You shouldn't worry about the battery; as long as you have the soft-reset patch applied to your ROM, you can simply use the soft reset buttons you chose to go back to the EZ-Flash menu.
It will backup the save file in SRAM without having to turn the system off, so even if the battery has run dry it *should* still allow you to save properly.

That's part of the reason why I like the EZ-Flash more than other GBA flashcards.
(Though I can't use mine anymore due to my miniSD being completely dead, but that's another story.)

 

[yellowsnowcone]

Thx for the quick responses.

 

[yellowsnowcone]

For what it is worth there is no great need to pair it (as in have something on the ak2i) to use the EZ4- it is quite happy as a standalone device and indeed even among those programs that do support it there is a list of caveats several lines long (first and foremost is do not use them to write to the EZ4 NOR). If you have flashme on your DS you can force a boot to a device quite easily (depending upon the version you install you press a button combination or it will autoboot the EZ4 if you prefer) and I am not sure what goes with software these days but there were reset tools back when.

I've seen talk of using GBA ExpLoader and the Ez-Flash IV. Were they all talking about the more expensive and rare Lite Deluxe, which the readme claims support for, and just not mentioning it was that particular model of the IV?

3. I believe some of the later ones are non rechargeable and the older ones that were rechargeable did not have much/anything in the way of overcharge protection (not that you could do much without a linker). Provided it can match the voltage and max current draw (although in practice it probably draws a lot less but let us not go there) and fits in the cart it does not really matter.

OK. Most links about it are dead now, with me being late to get into all of this. All I could gather were bits and pieces for the IV "phat" model, but some appeared to be talking about a rechargable, while others made no such mention, so I was kind of .

 

[Deleted-236924]

GBA ExpLoader should work with the EZ-IV, but whatever you do, do not use the NOR mode on ExpLoader with the EZ4.

 

[yellowsnowcone]

Cool, thx. Now I just have to get over 2GB MiniSD cards w/o adapters costing as much as 8GB SDHC.

 

[FAST6191]

"over 2GB MiniSD cards"

Consider anything over 2 gigs as SDHC and SDHC does not work on any GBA flash cart in a useful manner.

 

[yellowsnowcone]

"Get over," not, "over 2GB." I've a bad experience with adapters in a camera, so I know well enough to heed the warnings. It would be nice if they could update it to support SDHC, or update the 3in1 with 32MB PSRAM to give it rough parity with the EZ-Flash IV and M3 GEP as a dependent cart, but I'm guessing the market for slot-2 carts is not large enough to make that profitable today. I'm late to the party, so that's just how it goes.