Flash2Advance drivers and software

[patters]

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:

• 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)

My recollection is that the PowerWriter client tries to SRAM patch games as you add them. I tried this with a few ROMs and it seems a bit hit and miss. Two of the three I tried worked (Advance Wars just crashed to a white screen), so I think PogoShell is just better to manage multiple games. Back in the day I used to prefer to use the simpler F2A Writer client for flashing PogoShell compilations, since I don't think it messes with the payload, so I attach a couple of versions of that:

• F2A Writer 3.1 (final release, send multiboot feature doesn't work)
• F2A Writer 3.0
• F2A Writer Readme

Not sure how they compare to the drivers above, but there is also another set of the bare device drivers available here on Dwedit's board.

Anyway, hope this helps someone else. Multiplayer handheld Doom is worth the effort!

 

[jumphigh]

This seems working, hard to find higher versions like this. Awesome! Thanks a lot!

 

[Jayro]

I just buy repros from AliExpress and flash them myself with a modern usb flasher like the GBxCart RW v1.4

 

[DanTheManMS]

I went through my old archive and found a few things to attach. The first is fairly useless, just a collection of older loader menus (really you want the very latest one that comes preinstalled with the software Patters posted) including "loader33.gba" which is unique in its simplicity.

The second is much more interesting. When the F2A dev team vanished, someone on the forums went to the effort to keep the backend database file current, so that the software would know which save type and size to use for games that came out later in the GBA's lifespan. You would use this database file to replace the one that came with PowerWriter.

 

[pjeigh]

Does anyone have the drivers and Writer 2.0 for the cable version of the F2A Linker II (that'll also work on Win 7)?

The USB software is posted here but I have the ol' printer cable version and cannot get it to work with the USB writer software. Setup instructions would help as well as I hear the printer cable port can be a bit finicky.

I inherited the linker and a stack of carts from the game company I used to work for. I never actually used the F2A Linker, but dug it out of a box of wires and other "junk" they were going to toss out along with about a dozen carts that were used to test game builds back in the day.

 

[Shadow_The_Hedgehog82]

I just got an f2a with the usb linker it came with a disc in the box here is the files

https://archive.org/download/f2a256mdisc

 

[mrgone]

Does anyone have the drivers and Writer 2.0 for the cable version of the F2A Linker II (that'll also work on Win 7)?

The USB software is posted here but I have the ol' printer cable version and cannot get it to work with the USB writer software. Setup instructions would help as well as I hear the printer cable port can be a bit finicky.

I inherited the linker and a stack of carts from the game company I used to work for. I never actually used the F2A Linker, but dug it out of a box of wires and other "junk" they were going to toss out along with about a dozen carts that were used to test game builds back in the day.

printer cable (parallel port) version will likely not run under modern windows

 

[SylverReZ]

I just got an f2a with the usb linker it came with a disc in the box here is the files

https://archive.org/download/f2a256mdisc

Thanks for preserving! Downloaded. (P.s. please make it an ISO).

 

[Shadow_The_Hedgehog82]

Thanks for preserving! Downloaded. (P.s. please make it an ISO).

uploaded an iso to the archive page

 

[SylverReZ]

There were some interesting GBA demos in the lot too, one caught my eye so I upped it to YT.