The EZFlash team sent GBAtemp an EZFlash Omega to play with and it turned up this morning.
For those unaware the Omega is EZFlash's new GBA flash cart, one aiming to be the be all and end all of GBA flash carts. Initial impressions are that it could well be so, and even if not it will see you presumably able to play 99% of the GBA library with some fancy features in a fairly solid little cart. One that retailers are listing for around 40 Euros, 50 USD or 35 GBP.
The full review will cover all the troublesome games and properly put it through its paces but for now.

Out of the box
Mother 3 fan translation. Boots just fine in RAM.
Pokemon Emerald (game with real time clock). Clean ROM boots fine, saves clock as offset clock from onboard time and savestates/real time save works in it.
Various other games were tested, including a handful of prepatched games. Fine too.
Menu. Very very nippy, minimal boot times and all on a nasty little 8 gigabyte cart of the class 2 persuasion. Odd menu ordering system (possibly date related) but you can go up and down very quickly, and left and right skip pages. Otherwise simple enough.
SD slot. Moved to a friction slot rather than spring loaded used by the microSDHC version. Easy enough to insert and remove, even with my not so dainty finger. It is not impossible that you could miss the slot but it should not fall into the case if you do.
Build quality. The plastic moulding is a bit rough around the injection marks and insides but the outside finish is fine. A micrometer was fetched for the curious. Measurements taken about the thickest edge just before it dips for the sticker inlay (it is the furthest point from any support and where most would pinch it to flex).

Device	Measurement (mm)
Omega GBA size	1.337
Omega DS lite	1.213
Original EZ4	1.013
EZ4 microSDHC	0.926
EZ4 lite deluxe	1.168
EZ2	0.882
Motogp	1.254

All that said thickness is but part of the story when it comes to plastics and sheet goods. In function the Omega most resembles an original GBA cart case in that it slides together and is retained by clips once there. Do note this if you are swapping between the stock GBA size case and the DS lite size case.
Said sliding clips and mid line screw make for a far sturdier case than the sometimes maligned EZ4 microSDHC offering (no EZFlash reform to compare here). Fit and finish is otherwise pretty good, not necessarily jewellery grade but more than suitable and accurate where it counts.
The Omega lacks the "shoulders" of an original cart, as do all the others in its immediate line (the EZ2 has them) but otherwise fits fine in a GBA SP, original DS and was a bit stiff to get into an original GBA (possibly caused by differences in the alignment grooves/insets on the outside) but still worked.

PCB wise possibly a bit light with the solder paste in some places but no cold joints or anything likely to fall off, BGA looked fine as well under a loupe.
Chip numbers

Spoiler

Left to right in PCB shot below.
Spansion
71gl064a08bfw0b
0651bvb
china
http://www.datasheet.hk/view_download.php?id=1270277&file=0149\s71gl064aa0-0z_1304149.pdf
Possibly a menu/

xilinx
spartan
xc3s200a
ftg256agq1517
a5059562a
A FPGA from the main maker of such things. The 200K gate model should you be concerned about such matters.
https://www.xilinx.com/support/documentation/data_sheets/ds529.pdf

spansion
98ws512pe0fw003
748ppj40 g
malaysia
Possibly deprecated. A combined NOR and PSRAM chip.

Battery side
Windbond
25q16cvnig
1531
https://www.winbond.com/resource-files/da00-w25q16cvf1.pdf
Small flash memory chip. Possibly the programming/data chip for the FPGA

Silver top chip designated y1 in mask.
p24 54m 1603
Unknown

Under battery
8563s
Real time clock chip most likely
https://www.nxp.com/docs/en/data-sheet/PCF8563.pdf

8514n
unknown 2 pin device

3bqd
3 pin device
Unknown
v1 on solder mask

battery
Blocked by tab
3v
12.25mm
0.25mm inc cover and separator
1220 is most likely size. Maybe Duracell CR1220.

Pictures
Click to enlarge


You can see some videos, including those of the menu, from EZFlash's own teaser thread. They mirror what we saw in this initial test.

Official Usage guide
http://www.ezflash.cn/omega.html
EZFlash product homepage
http://www.ezflash.cn/product/omega/

 

[bradzx]

My bad, I was thinking of ezflashIV. I believe you’re I’ll have to cleanboot the rom. The manual will have more info on that.

Actually, you are wrong. I tried use L+B to load the rom and I tried use L+Up+B, nothing happen. It will launch the game without GSS. It said on EZ4quicktutorial when I download it. It don't need to change anything with Keyset.cfg.

 

[Localhorst86]

Actually, you are wrong. I tried use L+B to load the rom and I tried use L+Up+B, nothing happen. It will launch the game without GSS. It said on EZ4quicktutorial when I download it. It don't need to change anything with Keyset.cfg.

And you can permanently disable GSS in twee keyset.cfg. No need to launch using the Button combination.

Gesendet von meinem Mi A1 mit Tapatalk

 

[bradzx]

And you can permanently disable GSS in twee keyset.cfg. No need to launch using the Button combination.

Gesendet von meinem Mi A1 mit Tapatalk

Maybe I should do that because sometime I have bad habit to load the game without press L+B. I will do that when I feel like it. Thanks for help.

 

[Cart00nHead]

can anybody tell me for example if get this card and i use a rom folder with a size of say 5gb how much additional space would be used to play the games? meaning for example does it convert the files to run them on this device so would i in theory end up using 10 gb of space for the original rom files?

also does it run nes, gb ,gbc roms? is an additional emulator/s required for these? also same question as above regarding these

 

[FAST6191]

No conversion/decompression happening here. Any additional space used will be for saves, savestates, icons and cheats. Saves can be up to 128 kilobytes but that is rare (probably about 50, most of which are pokemon as they had 2-3 versions per generation, and 7 versions of each of those by the time you added up all the regions) and saves fall rapidly to 1KB (about 1200 of the 2800 games in the library are 4 kbit which is less than a kilobyte) and under from there -- it is not like many DS carts with their half meg before you even start saves.
I have not checked the savestate size for this but practically speaking it will be around 300 Kilobytes a pop by the time you add up all the readable memory. They are made when you make one in a game.
The (optional) icon pack is some 50 megs decompressed.

There are bundled emulators for them, however if you want to use alternative builds then you can.

In any case buy a 32 gig card (decent ones can be had for under a tenner at time of writing) and you will be able to play basically everything it will play and likely never run out of space, I would be impressed to see people run out of space on 16 come to think of it but that I can add up to easily enough.

 

[Cart00nHead]

thanks for the reply, I have one ariving next week

i have accounted for the icon pack, wondered can i use my scrapped box art that's already in my rom folder? also
does it run sega emulators then? such as megadrive sms sg1000? so far it looks like a 16gb card will do me so far.

 

[FAST6191]

There are no sega system emulators built into the kernel. You could add them (it was made open source), or maybe use builds with integrated pogoshell if there are plugins for them, or just build and use homebrew versions as standalone ROMs like we have done for ages otherwise.
Megadrive emulators were never made for the GBA, a fair few megadrive/16 bit era games were remade on it though and usually given a fairly good shake. Also SNES emulation can sort of maybe play some things (without sound of course) so don't bank on that. The is also PCE emulation which is pretty good actually and they got a bunch of games that otherwise hit the 16 bit world (PCE/TG16 bomberman for example).

Master system and game gear are handled and had some nice emulators made (SMSAdvance probably being a good start here). I will have to look up whether the older Sega stuff got emulators made as I can't recall any offhand but the GBA got loads of interesting little emulators over the years.
Edit. Apparently SMSAdvance supports SG1000 as well according to its readme, not sure as to how good it is or isn't but I am not expecting anything bad.

 

[Cart00nHead]

thanks i did think i read somewhere about sega emulators running on gba but wasn't sure about this specific flashcards support, rather than re treading threads and websites i thought no harm asking here.

my hope for this is to obviously get my gba library up and running and get a basic understanding of the card and how it works with the gba. is there a maximum number of roms i can put in a folder? of so can i have multiple folders to select?

the next step i hope is to get my nes library up and running and i'm more than happy with that.

BUT what i understand so far is..

snes emulation is not really worth doing for gba as i know there can be performance issues, and since there are two buttons missing and gba games are kind of similar and made for a smaller screen it would be a waist of storage in the long run to try get a decent library on there (and i could address that with a DS r4 or something i already have in the future maybe since we have got one in need of a bigger sd card)

i do know as far as sms emulators go, the sg1000 is usually supported and also the gamegear. i do believe sms to be possible on this system but i'm sure i did read somewhere about megadrive games running to add these would be great to have sms and gg, to get megadrive games would be cool to have it all on a gba micro.

 

[codezer0]

I never quite understood how to get NES games to work on the EZ4. Even with the complete GBA Romset on my 32gig SD there still implies to be enough space to also store the nes family roms too. It makes it sound like I can just drag and drop but all it does is complain that "no roms were found"

 

[Localhorst86]

I never quite understood how to get NES games to work on the EZ4. Even with the complete GBA Romset on my 32gig SD there still implies to be enough space to also store the nes family roms too. It makes it sound like I can just drag and drop but all it does is complain that "no roms were found"

"native" .nes support has only been added in the EZ omega.
The EZ4 does not have PocketNES built in. You have to make a pocketNES gba rom containing the emulator and the NES games.

 

[codezer0]

"native" .nes support has only been added in the EZ omega.
The EZ4 does not have PocketNES built in. You have to make a pocketNES gba rom containing the emulator and the NES games.

I'm sorry, but how do I do that? the only available downloads basically just have the pocketnes.gba file. Even if I put them in the same directory, it still whines about "no roms found".

 

[Localhorst86]

I'm sorry, but how do I do that? the only available downloads basically just have the pocketnes.gba file. Even if I put them in the same directory, it still whines about "no roms found".

PocketNES should have come with a menu maker (pnesmmw.exe). Run that to add your NES roms to a pocketNES image.

EDIT: make sure your PocketNES ROM size does not surpass 128Mbit (if you want to load it from PSRAM) or 256Mbit (If you want to flash it to NOR).

 

[codezer0]

PocketNES should have come with a menu maker (pnesmmw.exe). Run that to add your NES roms to a pocketNES image.

EDIT: make sure your PocketNES ROM size does not surpass 128Mbit (if you want to load it from PSRAM) or 256Mbit (If you want to flash it to NOR).

Every single download on here for Pocketnes is just the .gba file and a readme with the changelog. That's it. There's nothing else.

 

[Localhorst86]

Every single download on here for Pocketnes is just the .gba file and a readme with the changelog. That's it. There's nothing else.

http://www.dwedit.org/gba/pocketnes.php

this one comes with the menu maker.

 

[FAST6191]

thanks i did think i read somewhere about sega emulators running on gba but wasn't sure about this specific flashcards support, rather than re treading threads and websites i thought no harm asking here.

my hope for this is to obviously get my gba library up and running and get a basic understanding of the card and how it works with the gba. is there a maximum number of roms i can put in a folder? of so can i have multiple folders to select?

the next step i hope is to get my nes library up and running and i'm more than happy with that.

BUT what i understand so far is..

snes emulation is not really worth doing for gba as i know there can be performance issues, and since there are two buttons missing and gba games are kind of similar and made for a smaller screen it would be a waist of storage in the long run to try get a decent library on there (and i could address that with a DS r4 or something i already have in the future maybe since we have got one in need of a bigger sd card)

i do know as far as sms emulators go, the sg1000 is usually supported and also the gamegear. i do believe sms to be possible on this system but i'm sure i did read somewhere about megadrive games running to add these would be great to have sms and gg, to get megadrive games would be cool to have it all on a gba micro.

As far as homebrew emulators go then all of them should be able to be slapped into running essentially every emulator -- the Omega's distant ancestor in the EZ3 had a custom build of the PCE emulator to allow CD game support, as far as I know it was the only cart specific/enhanced emulator on the GBA.

Yeah I don't really recommend the SNES. At the time it was kind of cool but given everything that has happened since and state of things today then not really even as a curio.

Not sure what current limits are as far as folder depth or maximums. We have left the days of flash carts maxing out at 80 files per folder (and you could always have multiple folders to browse through). I am not sure what the extremes will be.

Megadrive wise I never saw anything close to running code, indeed I think a few people in Japan announced a project and that was about it. I am not sure why as the SNES was probably harder to do but it is what it is. Unless your game also features on the PCE or was ported to the GBA (again there are quite a few, sadly it was SNES Aladdin that got the port) it is not going to happen.

 

[kuwanger]

Not sure what current limits are as far as folder depth or maximums.

Currently, the max limits are 255 path length, 99 character filename, and 512 files per folder. A lot of these limits could probably be expanded, but it would be non-trivial: half of exwram is used up by the readcache, another 1/4th by the sort buffer, and most the rest by the cheat table/some other stuff. So, realistically it'd be about making a lot of more of that dynamically allocated as necessary. Iwram is also about half full, so only has ~11KB free.

Anyways, could be possibly wrong about some of that (looking through objdump and the various #define and arrays).

 

[Cart00nHead]

don't suppose anyone has any tips why i cant save super mario advance 2?

or tips on saving in general. i have the card all set up now and its great apart from that.

also can someone explain about writing a rom to the flash memory the official instructions are a bit well erm chinese broken englishy#

can pokemon be traded with the omega?

 

[Cart00nHead]

is there a way to run FDS famicom disk system files with the version of goomba built into the ezflash omega?

 

[cearp]

I think I saw something do this - is it easy/possible to put the omega in a real gba cart?

no important reason, but part of me thinks it would look cool if it looks like a normal game

 

[THYPLEX]

The full review ?