Hacking Help with G6DSReal and playing gba games on it

[maxsassy]

I have a G6DSReal and want to play gba games on it. I am a total noob and also a 59 year old woman. What do I need to buy in the way of a flash cart to allow me to play gba games on the ds? A step by step game plan would really help. Thanks in advance. If I am not suppose to ask this here, the adm is free to delete this or move it to where it belongs.

 

[Thanubis]

 

[cutterjohn]

...or an EZ Flash V 3-in-1, which you'd also need to get Rudolph's 3-in-1 Expansion Tool (there are other homebrew loaders for it, but I've only used Rudolph's and have been happy with it AND it works with my crappy Datel Games'n'Music while I await my CycloDS Evolution delivery...) There should be a link in one of the forums around here. (I don't have it handy ATM). Should be c. $20 from just about anywhere. ($22 from realhotstuff.com, I ordered mine from there, had them send via USPS(cheap) and got it in 2 days.)

Also you could look at the ewin game boy expansion pack. sky2k.com sells them for c. $14. (ewin supplies their own loader program, which you's run from your G6 card in slot-1.)

Another option is the EZ Flash IV Lite Deluxe (MUST be the deluxe version!). This one also has a microSD slot, and can run NDS applications as well as GBA stuff. This one should be around $42 (realhotstuff.com may be cheaper elsewhere, but like I said with the 3in1 comment their USPS shipping option makes them VERY attractive.)

The M3 DS Real has a perfect pack which is a M3DS Real slot 1 card, a rumble pack slot 2 card, and the GBA expansion/RAM pack slot 2. c. $55 Also I think that right now yo0u can't get the M3 GBA expansion pack by itself, and it probably would only work with an M3DS Real anyways.

It sounds like you would want the 3in1 as it's getting the most support at the moment, both from other hardware manufacturers and 3rd party homebrew apps. (All of the solutions can use the GBA cart as RAM for the DS Browser AND for DSLinux, but I guess that you'd not be interest in DSLinux...)

[EDIT]
ONE more VERY important item. If you do NOT have a DS Lite(the smaller newer version of the DS) you WILL need to make sure that whatever slot-2 solution that you buy is the one that works with the older DS design. Mainly this is the size of the cartridge that goes into slot-2 needs to be larger, and on the store site it will probably be listed as GBA size, or unlikely as phat size. The description may also specify that it only works in a DS Lite or either.

The 3in1 comes in GBA size, which is what I ordered from realhotstuff. I'm not sure about any of the others, as I have a DS lite and haven't looked too closely since I got the 3in1.
[/EDIT]

[EDIT2]
Also see this thread
http://gbatemp.net/index.php?showtopic=67066

...and just do a search on gba, or any of those cart names, e.g. 3in1 and limit the search to only this forum if you really only want mainly G6 specific stuff.
[/EDIT2]

[EDIT3]
While looking around for other things today, I came across the link for Rudolph's 3in1 tool and figured that I'd dump it in here. I use v1.9c from a Datel Games'n'Music (until my evo shows up), works fine.

http://www009.upp.so-net.ne.jp/rudolph/nds/3in1_ExpPack/

Also, since we didn't mention this before, you'll also want the EZF IV ROM tool, and/or GBATA 0.7a (IIRC) as GBA games that do NOT use SRAM save WILL need to be patched for the saves to work with the 3in1. Most recomendations that I've seen say to ONLY use the EZF IV patcher on games that have a 1024Mbit save file, o.w. use GBATA. I sort of mixed both as I never read all of that when I first started experimenting and haven't had ANY problems so far, but since you know this there must be a kernel of truth in that recomendation somewhere so I'd open all the files with GBATA first, check the save type then patch with the appropriate tool. (Very few games use the 1024Mbit FLASH save. Most are EEPROM or SRAM(no patching required).)

Also with the ewin, EZF IV lite deluxe, and EZF V 3-in-1 do NOT include a real time clock so any game that uses it will either have to be patched or it will complain about a battery being dead(e.g. pokemon), and ANY real time clock based event will NOT occur. Again very FEW games use the RTC. (I believe that pokemon is the only GBA game that I have that uses it... but I know that there are others) This also applies to any other carts that had special hardware included in the cart, motion sensor in the mario kart game IIRC, etc. but no slot-2 cart will supply these esoteric devices.
[/EDIT3]