ROM Hack Game in Converter Flash cart for GBA SP

[ark2301]

Hi All -

New to GBATemp, so, please excuse if this post is not relevant to this forum.

I recently got my hands on a flash cart (at least that is what I think it is) for my GBA SP. I am really not sure how to get this working. What firmware to add and how to load my roms on to it. Any help suggestions would really be appreciated. Thanks!

 

[FAST6191]

Top loading SD?

Never heard of that one before, search reveals not a lot, though usual assumption at this point is it is a clone of something.
There are very few things that would load a SD card like that, the few supercards with it were more offset than that, so were the GBA M3/GBAMP lines (not that I have ever seen a clone of that). Most other things were side loading. It is also not the same colour as anything there and being normal size GBA cart also rules out a fair few things too. No url on the sticker (most new carts would have something) and it is a fairly poor on that with the overlapping bits.

I am at a complete loss.

 

[Takokeshi]

Well that is a very strange cart... the label looks like a crude aftermarket? Looks like someone made up something in clipart and printed it on paper lol.

Not much to be found online about it... what does it show if you try to boot it? GBA carts generally never needed any kind of firmware or kernel on the sd card, it was all on the cart itself...

Maybe if you could open it up and post pictures of the pcb, someone could figure out if it's actually some other kind of cart, but then again I've never seen a top-loaded sd on a gba cart. Most really old ones used on-board memory that needed a special writer (I would love to get my hands on an ez flash III), and the newer ones have been side-loaded.

Although the everdrive is top-loaded... this is probably not an everdrive though.

 

[ark2301]

Yes, a Top loading SD
I used a 16gb card and booted up my GBA SP. But nothing happens.
I will try to open it up and will post pictures soon. But really appreciate your response. Thanks!

 

[Takokeshi]

"Nothing happens"

Does it show a Nintendo logo underneath "Gameboy Advance"? If it gets past Gameboy Advance logo, does it simply load into a white screen?

 

[ark2301]

It does not show the Nintendo logo underneath "Game Boy" and it doesn't get past the logo. The system freezes at "Game Boy".

 

[mrgone]

tbh if it stalls at the gameboy logo the cart is rejected from the hardware

if the sd card were missing files, usually it would at least signal that, since then the cart ran some code

you can of course try the major sd-card firmwares (ez-flash 4,...) on your sd and see if that helps

 

[ark2301]

Yeah, I will see if I can load some firmware into the cart. But honestly, I too think this one is broken.

 

[FAST6191]

Two main choices there.
No pink logo at the bottom means it did not display a valid header.

Dirty pins (which can come from factory or make poor contact with certain combos of device -- had plenty that work in one but not another*). Clean the pins and if you want to fold a bit of paper a few times to put between the PCB and plastic case to force better contact then some go for that too.

*also worth checking if your GBA is one of those with modded screen or something fun as those have caused issued with the more power hungry efforts.

Whatever is supposed to be on the SD card is somehow necessary for it to boot properly. I would not necessarily expect this but it has happened before.

That said I am still at a loss for this. As mentioned above most old school stuff used some combo of NOR memory or NAND memory and RAM. SD cards did appear very late in the day on the GBA with the supercard and GBAMP (some of which were also CF instead) from the same people that did the M3 and G6 and thus technically the first R4 but tended to be in larger form carts than standard GBA. It looks like none of those. By the time of the DS then things started using external memory more but most went for miniSD and then microSD to try to get it to fit more easily, especially when the DS lite soon appeared (until more recent things then the last gen of GBA slot DS flash carts was aiming to be in the DS lite slot).
I am not aware of any homebrew flash carts/designs that used SD memory or were particularly amenable to it, and I would have thought anybody good enough to both injection mould a new shell (that does not look like someone tool a rotary tool to an existing cart) and redesign something in current space year would have used a microSD slot (same cost, less PCB space wasted and it is a cram to do things here).

On 16 gig card I will also note you might need to find a 2 gig effort -- 0 to 2 gigs (with some vanishingly rare non compliant 4 gigs) were SD format, 4 to 32 was SDHC, 64 to I forget was SDXC and there is a newer one still these days. Many devices like this will only work with what they know and that might well be SD only.

To that end you have something very unusual there. I will await PCB shots.

 

[ark2301]

Two main choices there.
No pink logo at the bottom means it did not display a valid header.

Dirty pins (which can come from factory or make poor contact with certain combos of device -- had plenty that work in one but not another*). Clean the pins and if you want to fold a bit of paper a few times to put between the PCB and plastic case to force better contact then some go for that too.

*also worth checking if your GBA is one of those with modded screen or something fun as those have caused issued with the more power hungry efforts.

Whatever is supposed to be on the SD card is somehow necessary for it to boot properly. I would not necessarily expect this but it has happened before.

That said I am still at a loss for this. As mentioned above most old school stuff used some combo of NOR memory or NAND memory and RAM. SD cards did appear very late in the day on the GBA with the supercard and GBAMP (some of which were also CF instead) from the same people that did the M3 and G6 and thus technically the first R4 but tended to be in larger form carts than standard GBA. It looks like none of those. By the time of the DS then things started using external memory more but most went for miniSD and then microSD to try to get it to fit more easily, especially when the DS lite soon appeared (until more recent things then the last gen of GBA slot DS flash carts was aiming to be in the DS lite slot).
I am not aware of any homebrew flash carts/designs that used SD memory or were particularly amenable to it, and I would have thought anybody good enough to both injection mould a new shell (that does not look like someone tool a rotary tool to an existing cart) and redesign something in current space year would have used a microSD slot (same cost, less PCB space wasted and it is a cram to do things here).

On 16 gig card I will also note you might need to find a 2 gig effort -- 0 to 2 gigs (with some vanishingly rare non compliant 4 gigs) were SD format, 4 to 32 was SDHC, 64 to I forget was SDXC and there is a newer one still these days. Many devices like this will only work with what they know and that might well be SD only.

To that end you have something very unusual there. I will await PCB shots.

Thanks for that, it was really informative. Here are the PCB shots. Hope this gives you some idea, which might help me

 

[Takokeshi]

Surprisingly recent, huh. And looks very high-effort.

Are you able to clean the contacts in some way and see if you're able to at least get the console to recognize it?

(I assume there are no components of note on the back of the pcb? Because unless there is a chip hiding back there, it's no wonder it doesn't get recognized. It might actually be using the SD card as some kind of user-replaceable rom and/or ram chip.)

That or it's not even meant to be used in GBAs in the first place.

 

[mrgone]

Surprisingly recent, huh.

Could be 21st of january 2011.
But i agree, the PCB is much too clean for that age.
And the fact that there is no memroy chip are anything else.
Even if there were another chip on the backside, which i doubt, there would be much more passives (resistors, capacitors), traces and vis (small holes)
the fact that it's a large SD Slot and not for microsd makes it also very suspicious in my eyes

 

[Takokeshi]

I hate date standards lol

My first thought was that a 21st month didn't exist and I automatically assumed this meant it was the year didn't stop to think 21 could be Day instead.

 

[FAST6191]

YMD is also the format a lot of Chinese firms will use. Even in 2011 though full fat SD would have been an odd sight.

It gets odder it seems.
As others noted no active chips on that side and I doubt they could have buried enough on the back side (not to mention I don't see a single via in any of that, could be hidden by the SD card but eh) or under the SD card slot. Also a variety of surface mount sizes which would speak to some measure of sophistication.

At this point I could match up pins of the SD card ( https://pinouts.ru/Memory/sdcard_pinout.shtml ) to pins of the GBA slot
http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#auxgbagamepakbus http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#gbacartridges
https://web.archive.org/web/20160414182115/http://reinerziegler.de/GBA/gba.htm . Several pins on the GBA side of things are blank compared to what would be being used if it was a full fat flash cart.

What I guess this is then is some kind of data out tool someone made to chuck data out of the GBA port for DS or multiboot/link port GBA homebrew (SD cards have a quite simple raw write function you could possibly access with that many pins https://hackaday.com/2013/08/19/rescuing-an-sd-card-with-an-arduino/ ).
I have never seen such a thing before but it is common enough on other systems, and who knows what some random forum somewhere did for their own purposes.

 

[ghjfdtg]

Wasn't there some GBA clone console by Revo or how they are called that uses this kind of adapter? It clearly just routes pins from SD to the GBA cart. It doesn't do anything else.

 

[Nikokaro]

1) I suggest you to use, at least as an initial test, an SD of 2 GB or less;
2) If it still doesn't read roms, try to use this PC software (for SuperCard clones) I post below to patch gba roms: start trying with one rom. I repeat, with 2gb SD or less.
It doesn't hurt to try. I don't guarantee it will work. However there is no danger, since you don't modify the internal kernel, but only the roms.

 

[ark2301]

Thank you all for your comments. I will try your suggestions this weekend and will give you all an update. My first plan is to get a 2Gig mem card and check if it works. And will try the other solutions. Will keep you all posted. Thanks again!!!!

 

[Takokeshi]

If it's indeed wiring the SD slot directly to GBA slot pins... I don't think the GBA knows how to handle fat (or others) filesystems on its own. If the idea was for the sd card to act as some kind of socket-able rom chip then you might need to write stuff to it raw. In which case it (probably?) wouldn't matter whether it's SD or SDHC because sd card drivers don't come into play anyway.

 

[FAST6191]

Wasn't there some GBA clone console by Revo or how they are called that uses this kind of adapter? It clearly just routes pins from SD to the GBA cart. It doesn't do anything else.

Solid guess that I had missed earlier.
However looking around even they used offset microSD.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130121225200/http://www.k1gbasp.com/images/Revo-k101-firt-batch-1.jpg
https://gbatemp.net/threads/k101-revo-official-gbatemp-review.339019/
https://web.archive.org/web/2020120...omgmog.net/reviews/review-the-revo-k101-plus/

 

[mrgone]

Solid guess that I had missed earlier.
However looking around even they used offset microSD.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130121225200/http://www.k1gbasp.com/images/Revo-k101-firt-batch-1.jpg
https://gbatemp.net/threads/k101-revo-official-gbatemp-review.339019/
https://web.archive.org/web/2020120...omgmog.net/reviews/review-the-revo-k101-plus/

that cart has a microsd slot, not a slot for a large sd.

but in light of all suggestions:
i think the cart requires a non-gba-hardware to support this sd slot.