Hacking Flashing Bootleg GBA Cart with NDS?

[Aarmastah]

Hey all. I recently remembered that I own a bootleg copy of Pokémon Fire Red, and I heard that these bootleg carts are easy to re-flash with stuff like the Joey Joebags. That got me to thinking, though, and I'm wondering if it is at all possible to use NDS homebrew to flash a bootleg cart in the GBA slot.

I've heard that one person has had success with it: https://github.com/nflsilva/nds-gbabf

 

[FAST6191]

Would depend entirely upon the type of bootleg and method used to make it.

If it is one that can be reprogrammed with the GBA pins as used by the GBA then yeah you can probably do it. That is however a big if -- there are a wide variety of approaches used in the bootleg/repro circles, though few enough that you can check if you wanted. Also some of the titles seem to have adopted other approaches to the ROMs, which may be in addition to whatever flashing means there are (there were some threads around here where someone dumped their bootleg and the ROM was very different to the ROM it purported to be), so you may have to adapt your homebrew (or other ROM) to conform to that or work around it.

Few people put any real effort into investigating such things though as most modern repros are not of great quality and flash carts do 100x times better at pretty reasonable prices.