Hacking F2A 256 Help

[Niku]

I've got an old Flash2Advance 256 Mbit card that I like because if I put only a single game on it, it acts like a completely normal GBA cart without needing to go through the bootup process or anything. But now I'm having trouble. I want to stick Mother 3 on there, but the cart just doesn't recognize the ability to write the game at all. It acts like it's writing, and pulls up the write screen, but everything stays at 0 and if I turn off the GBA it continues to think it's writing. Other games still write fine. any help?

 

[wabo]

From my experience, a full 256 mbits doesn't fit on the F2A, you have to trim it at least a little bit for it to be written. Since standard gba rom trimmers dont seem to trim any data at all on mother 3, it can be a problem.

My only guess is trying to manually trim some bytes with an hex editor and hope it doesnt screwup the game.

 

[Jaejae]

AFAIK GBATA has a trimming function, I would suggest it if you cbf hex editing.

 

[wabo]

Yes GBATA has a trimming function, i tried trimming mother 3 even before i replied, else i would have just said, trimm it with GBATA

But gbata doesn't want to trimm one single byte on the game.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Open it up with a hex editor and scroll all the way to the bottom. Perhaps there are a few bytes of garbage data before the rows of FF and/or 00 that indicate trimmable space.

 

[Niku]

Thanks for the help. I've been trying to trim it with XVI32, but so far I'm unsure of what I can safely trim and what I can't. There's one huge block of 00s, and toward the end a fair amount of number pairs amidsts FF pairs. Trimming a bit of this makes it 255Mb .. but that's not enough alone to fit it on there. Kinda frustrating, since I own the game and mostly am trying to get this to work so I can try and put the romcard board into the Mother 3 casing some day in the future when the translation is done, so I can have an "English copy" of Mother 3.

EDIT: I got it to fit. Awesome.

Now I just have to hope once the translation patch comes out, it doesn't use any of the junk I trimmed out ..

 

[MarcDK]

did anyone try to fit the patched mother 3 rom on a f2a 256 MBit? What can be trimmed? Can someone help me?