Hacking Trying to make the Supercard suck less in 2022...

[AkikoKumagara]

The point here is not that other available cards are bad, is that the SuperCard is cheap and there is plenty already sold out there.

Might not be your point, but it seems to be a general consensus. It's great if people want to make something better, but my point is there should be something affordable that doesn't need extra labor to make it decent or functional
With DS carts being as refined as they are that even piss poor cheap clone carts can do just about everything most people would want, it's just disappointing that the GBA hasn't gotten a remotely similar market over the years.

 

[tk9]

This is high quality, without the BGA solder shit.

I don't recommend this one. Yes it's 256M Flash1m but only a few games are Flash1m it also doesn't have RTC. Some Pokemon games and F-zero comes to mind. Most romhacks run Flash512k and I think it also needs a chinese-modded gbxcart clone to be flashed. Their RTC flashcarts seems okay though and it's almost a literal copy of the one from insidegadgets and we're really going slightly off-topic now. This thread is about trying to make Supercard better. LOL

 

[pustal]

Might not be your point, but it seems to be a general consensus. It's great if people want to make something better, but my point is there should be something affordable that doesn't need extra labor to make it decent or functional
With DS carts being as refined as they are that even piss poor cheap clone carts can do just about everything most people would want, it's just disappointing that the GBA hasn't gotten a remotely similar market over the years.

Yeah but we can't make companies do affordable things. This is wehat the modding and homebrew community is all about: changing how things work or adding functionality to make them better.

 

[AkikoKumagara]

Yeah but we can't make companies do affordable things. This is wehat the modding and homebrew community is all about: changing how things work or adding functionality to make them better.

If there's demand for something and money to be made, it has at least a chance of happening. By saying "nah, everything is great how it is", we're demonstrating the opposite of demand for a better product.

 

[Trevor_2012]

I don't recommend this one. Yes it's 256M Flash1m but only a few games are Flash1m it also doesn't have RTC. Some Pokemon games and F-zero comes to mind. Most romhacks run Flash512k and I think it also needs a chinese-modded gbxcart clone to be flashed. Their RTC flashcarts seems okay though and it's almost a literal copy of the one from insidegadgets and we're really going slightly off-topic now. This thread is about trying to make Supercard better. LOL

I talked about the quality of this card because it doesn't use chips with BGA soldering, because the BGA on the ezflash omega is shit, and the super card is good because it doesn't have a chip with bga, it has a superior construction to the ezflash omega.

 

[AsisA]

I like your work. I just bought a Supercard miniSD yesterday and today it won't be recognised. Just two days and it's broken.

I tried to restore the firmware with SCflash_sd.nds but it failed. Do you know how to solve this problem? Or is there any other nds software that can be used to flash the firmware?

And I found the official open source interface definition, I don't know if that helps or not so I upload it as an attachment.

 

[aoikurayami]

I have always been intrigued by the Sc's tbh.

I have a ezomega, m3cf etc etc.

But these cards always eluded me.
I like their ahem.. Builtin slowdown feature xD.

Might need the save tool to get a use outta this thing.

*rustles through old files*
Edit: ThereItIs: https://projectpokemon.org/home/files/file/1975-offline-save-file-type-converter/

 

[pustal]

I like your work. I just bought a Supercard miniSD yesterday and today it won't be recognised. Just two days and it's broken.

I tried to restore the firmware with SCflash_sd.nds but it failed. Do you know how to solve this problem? Or is there any other nds software that can be used to flash the firmware?

View attachment 405785View attachment 405786

And I found the official open source interface definition, I don't know if that helps or not so I upload it as an attachment.

You should tag @metroid maniac just in case forgot to subscribe to the thread.

 

[AsisA]

You should tag @metroid maniac just in case forgot to subscribe to the thread.

I've just joined the forum and not too familiar with the rules yet. Thank you so much : )

 

[metroid maniac]

Don't worry, I'm still subscribed to the thread

With an error like that, the best guess I have is that it's a faulty flash chip. Flash goes bad eventually and you can't rewrite it any more.

 

[AsisA]

Don't worry, I'm still subscribed to the thread

With an error like that, the best guess I have is that it's a faulty flash chip. Flash goes bad eventually and you can't rewrite it any more.

Thanks for answering my questions. I bought another DSL in the last couple of days to try and save the card, but it still failed, so it seems that Flash is really bad. The quality of this card sucks.

 

[DanTheManMS]

Agreed with the consensus that it's probably a faulty flash chip. I can't believe the Supercard is still being sold. It was never a good option, and that's coming from someone who was formerly part of the SCDev forum back when it existed.

 

[Nikokaro]

...that's coming from someone who was formerly part of the SCDev forum back when it existed.

WOW... We have a big shot here, you might say, and we were totally unaware of this. What an honor!

 

[pustal]

Agreed with the consensus that it's probably a faulty flash chip. I can't believe the Supercard is still being sold. It was never a good option, and that's coming from someone who was formerly part of the SCDev forum back when it existed.

Doesn't it still?
https://www.scdev.org/forum/index.php
Or different forum?

 

[sno]

So has any ideas on simple easy improvements been mentioned yet that does work on the supercard? I been playing with my new one a little bit. I had one when I was younger. I know there's some update utility for the card itself and I think the last one released for that might have been like 2010 or something. Anything better than that? The title is "make it suck LESS". Anything comes to mind? Also wondering about alternatives to moonshell when on NDS or even whatever the heck would be running on gba? menu is kinda ugly.

 

[tk9]

So has any ideas on simple easy improvements been mentioned yet that does work on the supercard? I been playing with my new one a little bit. I had one when I was younger. I know there's some update utility for the card itself and I think the last one released for that might have been like 2010 or something. Anything better than that? The title is "make it suck LESS". Anything comes to mind? Also wondering about alternatives to moonshell when on NDS or even whatever the heck would be running on gba? menu is kinda ugly.

It has "making it suck LESS" but don't forget the word "Trying" from the title. There're no simple and easy improvements. There was prefetch and fastrestart patch many years ago but it's not simple and easy and
maybe these can help:
Some old guide- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1U-f9ZGDRbBuVqAcP4fh5IPMLl6hkMv2d
There is a slightly more updated guide I think. I remember Nikokaro sent it on a thread somewhere about supercards. I can't find it when I google it but it's TheFifthElement v1.1 something like that.

Some tools- https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/186xDtJOabIJOZdPN8inURdHMcKA9nM2o

You can use Twilight Menu++ for your NDS if you want a better looking menu using a Flashcard and just make the Supercard as a RAM source to run GBA games natively
https://wiki.ds-homebrew.com/twilightmenu/
https://gbatemp.net/threads/ds-i-3d...-ds-i-games-and-ds-i-menu-replacement.472200/

 

[metroid maniac]

Hi all.

I've been looking again at this project... I really let this one rot for a while, huh?
Thanks to the indispensable help of SiliconExarch I've been able to build a binary which can access the Supercard's SD card.
Incorporating the previous work this means it's now possible to flash the Supercard with a functioning proof-of-concept custom firmware.

The demo video shows it running a retail GBA ROM directly but the expected use case is that it will be used to load a kernel with a file browser, save maangement features, ROM patching etc. Archeychen has already made good work towards that possibility in this thread, but I'm going to investigate it myself too.
A little birdie told me that a SDHC driver may be soon available, in which case it would be possible to integrate it into this firmware and a custom kernel.
This will require some cleanup before I release anything but rest assured that I'm again trying to make the Supercard suck less in 2024

 

[AsisA]

That's really cool, my supercard probably has a corrupt flash chip and can't be fixed. But since I came here last time, I've looked into how to burn gba games to cartridge and tried to compile gbabf and add a chip support (but unfortunately it only recognises the chip but can't burn it), and I had no knowledge of hardware before that. I found developing software more fun than playing games, but developing software (especially dealing with hardware) is really hard, especially for people with no hardware knowledge.

Very looking forward to the release of this firmware, and I can try to salvage my supercard again

Post automatically merged: Jan 27, 2024

Wow, 5 minutes after I replied to this thread, I had another try at flashing the supercard. this time it was stuck at 7% and reported an error (it had always reported an error at 5%-6% before), but it can be booted up !

 

[jejer]

Great work! Thank you