Hacking Idea/ Question

[DudeMG]

Hi, awhile ago I bought the ds internet browser. Its a DS cart which came with a "memory expansion pack". The pack was just a slot 2 cart and the Browser required it to be in. So couldn't this memory pack be used to flash gba roms/homebrew if used with a slot-1 cart?

 

[wchill]

No, the pack is just "dumb" RAM. You need a lot more hardware than that to run GBA games/homebrew unfortunately.
Look at pictures of a M3 Perfect PCB and you'll know what I mean.

 

[DudeMG]

No, the pack is just "dumb" RAM. You need a lot more hardware than that to run GBA games/homebrew unfortunately.
Look at pictures of a M3 Perfect PCB and you'll know what I mean.

aww man...I thought this might work but I guess not. ok thanks

 

[DeMoN]

The memory expansion is only good for speeding up certain homebrew, such as SNemulDS. It also allows you to play homebrew that require the extra RAM, such as Quake 2 DS.

I don't know why you bought the DS browser, but if you bought an EZ-Flash 3in1 instead, you could just pirate the browser and use the EZ-Flash cart as a RAM expansion, plus you can play GBA games with it.

 

[Jakob95]

No, the pack is just "dumb" RAM. You need a lot more hardware than that to run GBA games/homebrew unfortunately.
Look at pictures of a M3 Perfect PCB and you'll know what I mean.

Actually that is not the reason why GBA games won't work on that. The reason is because GBA start from the Ram 0x8000000 or something like that but the Memory Expansion Pack starts from 0x90000000 or something like that.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Correct. The GBA BIOS is programmed to start code execution at memory offset 0x8000000 while the writeable portion of the Opera RAM pack doesn't start until 0x9000000. Perhaps they did this to ensure that the RAM pack would always show up as an "option pack" in the DS firmware and never be misinterpreted as a GBA game. To be honest I'm not really sure. But that's the real reason why you can't flash GBA games to it, and why homebrew DS games can still make use of its 8 MB of RAM.

 

[cracker]

My 2 cents about why it would be useless if it was implemented..

It actually should be possible to use the offical RAM expansion cart to run software by jumping to 0x9000000 from 0x8000000 but of course that would require a Slot 2 flash cart anyway to boot into GBA mode and then you would have to swap the GBA flash cart with the RAM cart -- thus only being able to copy over less than 384K that could be stored in GBA mode.

 

[DudeMG]

...
I don't know why you bought the DS browser, but if you bought an EZ-Flash 3in1 instead, you could just pirate the browser and use the EZ-Flash cart as a RAM expansion, plus you can play GBA games with it.

Well I bought it way before I knew anything about this kinda stuff so if i'd known, thats what I would've done.