Hacking GBA support with a slot-1 cart possible?

[Siio]

I'm an electronics engineer by trade. My theory tells me that it should be possible since slot-2 used a noPass to boot NDS code. Maybe it can be done in reverse. The slot-1 copies the GBA file to the Browsers RAM and boots from there. I know nothing about DS architecture or the amount of software coding that would be needed to do something like this.

For those out there that know DS hardware/software code could something like this be possible?

 

[Sinkhead]

Yeah, the EZ-Flash Team have just announced something like this.
Take a look at their website for more information

- Sam

 

[Siio]

Oh, cool! I hope the R4DS team does something like this. I currently don't have a slot-2 card (broke and went with slot-1 instead). I did plan on replacing my slot-2 cart a few months from now. I think I'll wait though and see what happens.

 

[Sonstwer]

I'm an electronics engineer by trade. My theory tells me that it should be possible since slot-2 used a noPass to boot NDS code. Maybe it can be done in reverse. The slot-1 copies the GBA file to the Browsers RAM and boots from there. I know nothing about DS architecture or the amount of software coding that would be needed to do something like this.

For those out there that know DS hardware/software code could something like this be possible?

Nice idea, but it won't work with the official browser ram cart. The 8 MByte (64MBit - GBA games can be up to 256MBit) RAM in the cart are mapped at address 0x09000000 which is just in the middle of the address space used for GBA carts. Even if you would patch the game to run from a different address than usual you'd still have to find a way to convince the GBA BIOS in the DS to start the game from there (no idea if it is possible). You'd also be missing memory for saves.

On the other hand it should work nicely using a custom RAM-cart like the one announced by the EZTEAM. Technically it should also be possible to use some of the existing slot-2 carts with RAM (like the M3 oder Supercard) to do this, but I guess nobody bothered writing the code for it yet because the qualifying carts already have their own software that can do the job.