Hacking Firelinker 128mb stops working

[phantom7]

Hi there just needed help with my Firelinker/Fire Linker 128mb.

First of all, yup I know how old it is and people probably don't use it anymore but where I am it's hard to find GBA flash carts.

Anyway The problem is that it stops working if I put it my GBA consoles (turn the GBA on with the Firelinker card and does not load just the GAME BOY text start up screen).

I do know it still works as when ever I did pull it out the put it back in repetitively it would come up with a garbled/scrambled NINTENDO text under the GAME BOY text and also I am able to use SPLINK to put a game on it just won't load the game after complete.

I heard about the gbafix on http://sites.google.com/site/gggddfdgju/home but unsure how it works with the command line tool.

Thanks for reading.

 

[thaddius]

Perhaps you should clean the cartridge contacts?

 

[phantom7]

Yup have tried that before and it didn't work. I use a glass cleaner liquid and it works well with q-tips when cleaning my other game Boy games but when I tried it with Firelinker, nothing changed, I even opened it to clean the back of the circuit board and just got the same screen or the garbled NINTENDO text.

 

[thaddius]

I have never heard of people using ammonia to clean games. A friend of mine who owned a video game store said that he would always use a brass polish like Brasso to clean contacts and that solvents were not advisable (I have used rubbing alcohol for years without any issues, but ammonia is a new one).

For GBAFIX, I'm going to assume that you followed the instructions on the link you provided and know how to open the cmd/DOS shell prompt and that you were born after the 80s so you have no DOS skills.

You might want to put the GBAFIX folder and the gba files you want to use in the root of your C:\ directory. You can do this by opening the "Computer" window and dragging the GBAFIX folder to C. This will make it easier to find in the CMD/DOS prompt.

Run the CMD prompt and if it says anything other than "C:\" type "cd.." and then enter until it does (example: C:\Program Files\, if you type in cd.. it will change to C:\).

After that find the GBAFIX folder (if you named the folder "GBAFIX" just type "cd GBAFIX" and hit enter and you'll end up with the line saying "C:\GBAFIX"). If don't remember what the folder is called and if you're too lazy too look in your Computer directory to find out you can type "dir" and press enter and it will list all the files in the C:\ directory.

This is when you type in "gbafix -tTITLE FILENAME.gba". An example would be if you had a copy of Super Mario Advance with a filename of "SMA.gba", type: "gbafix -tSuper_Mario_Advance SMA.gba".

Hope that helps.

 

[DanTheManMS]

It might also be easier to use GBATA to fix the header rather than GBAFIX. I don't think this lets you set the title like GBAFIX can, but at least the Nintendo logo won't be corrupted, and it's a GUI instead of a command-line program so it's easier for newbies.