Hardware GBA GBA to PC link cable?

[Zephyrum_Alsend]

I was wondering if there exists a custom link cable to connect a GBA to a PC?
Specifically, I intend to use it with the Tango client for MMBN multiplayer and want to use my actual GBA for controls instead of a keyboard. To that end, it does not matter if the game is running on an emulator on the PC with the GBA as a simple controller or the game running on the GBA itself with the PC as a pass through.

 

[metroid maniac]

https://github.com/extremscorner/gba-as-controller

Maybe you could use this plus a GC to USB adapter?

 

[FAST6191]

For the record say GBA to PC link cable and most will think you want to play link games with your PC. There was a fork of VBA many years ago (called vbalinkreal) that did that but I believe that was lost to time (vbam apparently found some stuff though so maybe you get lucky). Today though most would probably dump saves, use a computer and flash saves back as necessary.

That said yeah you can use multiboot cables to have your GBA function as a controller, should not even need a flash cart (though I am sure you could use one of those too).
Have been able to for quite a while actually, though I believe this method uses a rather rare and hard to come by cable

Most designs you can build today are probably more parallel port based and trying adapt for USB could be tricky (though off the shelf parts and designs for general rs232 and parallel port to USB are available and quite suitable for beginners at least until the software side of things appears). https://github.com/tangrs/usb-gba-multiboot I have not tried but might be something worth looking at, https://web.archive.org/web/20150810222526/http://reinerziegler.de/GBA/gba.htm#Multiboot https://os.mbed.com/users/kek/notebook/gameboy-advance-multiboot/ http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#auxxboopctogbamultibootcable https://web.archive.org/web/20150810170955/http://www.devrs.com/gba/files/mbv2faqs.php

No way the GBA link cable could support any kind of video streaming or memory dumps fast enough to matter.

 

[DrunkenMonk]

Honestly the way this question was posed in the thread title, I figured you meant something like TCPoke, but realistically you may as well just solder the buttons up to a controller interface/keyboard encoder, make a little spot to connect it to your PC via USB and end up with something a little more universal that would easily map on just about anything

 

[Zephyrum_Alsend]

These are some good leads, especially @FAST6191 . The 480p and low audio makes it hard to tell what's what, but seems like if I can get a USB to GBA cable that supports multi-boot, I'll be able to use some software to treat my GBA like a controller.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Hey there, I'm DanTheMan who made that video, and hopefully I can add a bit more info. Yeah, Youtube only allowed 480p at the time, and my digital camera had very limited video capabilities so I doubt re-uploading it would make it any better.

Anyway, the main link was actually already supplied by FAST6191, though in the slightly wrong spot on the page. This is where you want to look: https://web.archive.org/web/20150810222526/http://reinerziegler.de/GBA/gba.htm#cart reader and https://web.archive.org/web/20150302032339/http://www.teamknox.com/ula/ula.html

The software they provide lets you use the GBA as a USB joypad with a homemade USB cable built using the "ULA" specification. I've never been a big hardware tinkerer myself, so I never made one of those cables.

I did however happen to buy a Flash2Advance Ultra cart and it came with a USB linker cable. It appears that the commercial Flash2Advance USB cables were actually slightly modified ULA designs. Thus, the people behind the controller software then created a special file to make it work with the F2A cable rather than a homemade one.

That's how my video was made. I replaced/renamed the original "gba_boot.bix" with "gba_boot_f2a_lmt.bix" which made it work with my commercial cable, and that was that.

Note: it only worked AFTER I had installed the drivers to get the F2AU cable working in the first place, which to my knowledge only works up to Windows XP. The drivers will not install correctly on Vista (lol) or newer. It might work via a virtual machine or something, but I never tried it myself.

 

[patters]

Interesting. You can get F2A drivers working in Vista and Windows 7 (32bit only) using the drivers that I recently dug up and posted here. And they do work in a VM. I have had success using VirtualBox on macOS.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Interesting. You can get F2A drivers working in Vista and Windows 7 (32bit only) using the drivers that I recently dug up and posted here. And they do work in a VM. I have had success using VirtualBox on macOS.

Very cool! When I tried back in the day, I kept getting BSODs in Vista and never attempted much further. I'll check out a virtual machine sometime. As for right this moment, the WinXP desktop featured in that video still exists, and so as long as it's alive I'll keep using it for my F2AU stuff!

 

[ZZetsus]

¡Muy guay! Cuando lo intenté en el pasado, seguí obteniendo BSOD en Vista y nunca intenté mucho más. Comprobaré una máquina virtual en algún momento. En cuanto a este momento, el escritorio WinXP que aparece en ese video todavía existe, así que mientras esté vivo, ¡lo seguiré usando para mis cosas F2AU!

Hello, is it possible to make a homemade Gamecube link cable?

 

[FAST6191]

That is a very different question. I have opened up a GBA-GC link cable a few times, including some from third parties, and they had what look like active chips on them when I did. I don't know if they are simple signal inverters, regulators or something more elaborate and I have not seen any homebrew guides (though I could easily have missed such a thing if it came and went without fanfare -- very few games use the link cable to any real degree and most of those have superior alternatives these days as well).

You can see at least part of the PCB in https://gbatemp.net/attachments/gba_gc_link1-jpg.322842/ (one of the later images in https://gbatemp.net/review/analogue-pocket-gb-gbc-and-gba-handheld-fpga-based-player.2081/ if you were curious about the greater context). Can sort some better ones later if you want, still not found my third party ones since then though.

If you can get one then it is probably not a very hard thing to analyse with an oscilloscope if you wanted to go that way and build out a collection of them (two leads, capture input from the GC side and output as it leaves to go into the GBA side).

Looking at
https://allpinouts.org/pinouts/connectors/videogame/nintendo-gamecube-controller-connector-pinout/ and http://problemkaputt.de/gbatek.htm#auxlinkport does not see any great observations leap out at me. Again not aware of any homebrew efforts in this aspect, whether gclinux ( http://gc-linux.org/wiki/Main_Page ) or dolphin source code ( https://github.com/dolphin-emu/dolphin ) will have anything more I don't know but that would be where I start. http://hitmen.c02.at/files/yagcd/yagcd/index.html does not look to have much either. https://github.com/FIX94/gba-link-cable-dumper might also be of interest if it covers how the signals work.