Be Excellent To Each Other

Dear wise Beexers.

I broke my DS a while back and it made me sad. But I've been getting by with my wonderful GBA Micro. The most UNDERRATED AND AWESOME portable of all time.

I've noticed some ace homebrew that I want to play with namely powder (a lovely (& pretty) angband clone) and bullethell (sic) an ace shmup. That and carrying round a handful of cartridges undermines the tiny beauty of the micro.

SO! Could someone recommend an ace (and cheap) flashcart? I figure I should get one before people forget about the GBA all together.

It needs to have:

• Drag and drop support for .gba files and just pop up as a USB drive
• No software or anything needed (I DON'T HAVE A WINDOWS MACHINE)
• A decent size, but nothing special

[*] basically as close to an r4 for the gba as possible
[*} cheapo
Any recommendations to illuminate this ignorant fool will be greatly appreciated!

At work so cant really search , however a few things to note :

1) The original GBA flash cards tend to have the best compatibility results however they do need a computer and a program to update the software on them

2) Because of the size the early DS 'slot2' type cards look way out of place on a micro ( i have a great card that fits all your needs but its around twice the width of the micro)

heres my old card in a DS lite - it works *perfectly* for GBA stuff but i dont think it'll really be suitable :


3) Some of the early cards which take memory cards can be picky over card types and sizes

Thanks!

It seems impossible to get one card that satifises the needs to both work with a mac and be the size of a normal cart.

I've been browsing deal-extreme with no success.

I realised that teh GBA will be dead soon (what with the DSi) so that I better get a flashcart now or never. Maybe I left it too late already...

Okay - apologies for the delay but i've dug out my old cards and have a play around with them - i have :

1) A EFA "Extremeflashadvanced" http://www.efa.cc/index-e.html



I have a much older version which is 512 but actually is only about 64 megabytes
Works great for just about any GBA game , I also have a 'bridge' adaptor (cost about another £10 when i got it) which lets you put GB games on the card and play them (but you couldnt do this on a DS or a Micro)

The drawback is that you need to connect the custom cable to your machine , and run a program to transfer the files and save games to and from the device , and as far as i'm aware its windows only.

It was also very expensive when i first got it and since you couldnt use it for DS games you started to see less and less of them around
Dealextreme have them listed for $20 but none in stock http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.10447

2) A Supercard SD (slot2)



The GBA compatibility on this is 'okay' but there is some slowdown in games and it doesnt handle some specific titles , i got this really as a flashcard for the DS when it first came out because it was one of the first to do DS games (all of which had to be patched to run from slot2) http://eng.supercard.sc/products.htm
It does have the advantage that you can run emulators on here so NES / GB / etc are all great but for actual GBA games i'd give it a miss

For GBA games you can just drop them on the card but there is also software you can run to patch them (not absolutely required)

Dealexteme sell the mini sd version (so slightly smaller) for $13.00 http://www.dealextreme.com/details.dx/sku.2734

3) An M3 adaptor (old version which is the big thing i showed sticking out of my DS lite above) http://www.m3adapter.com/SLOT-2_Series_M3.htm

As mentioned i have a really old version of this (which takes sd cards) , but there are newer ones which take both mini and micro sd

Compatibility is great although the save function can be a bit awkward (your save is in a special area on the card itself and only written back to your memory card when you turn the machine *back* on after shutting the game off) , it plays just about every game out there , and has built in emulators to play NES / GB games.

Again there is software to convert and add features but you can just drop the roms on

Dealextreme dont seem to have the older cards listed but the M3 website does list some uk sellers (http://www.m3adapter.com/global_sell_ne ... tedKingdom) but i've not used any of them and the links are probably ancient

This place was linked to from gbatemp in December last year as a seller still with stock of the mini sd card version

http://www.realhotstuff.com/-c-36_46.html which is $36

I did also have a card which was something like Firebrand or Firebase , it was very cheap at the time and the reason behind that it was terrible , the software to flash the games on required you to plug a special cable from your GBA to the parallel port on the PC , turn on the GBA with start and select held down (so it went into some type of transfer mode) and it slowly wrote the games to the card using the GBA itself
It only worked on original GBA's and SP's not micros and the software was in terrible engrish and kept timing out , when i sold my GBASP i bundled it with it saying it was there but rubbish - it had about 4 games on though so if you just treated it as a multi game card and didnt change them youd do fine :-)

Let me know if you have any other questions on this.

** Edit ** almost forgot size :-)

The EFA card is the exact same size as a normal GBA card
The Supercard is about an inch larger , but i have the SD card version the mini SD ones are closer to the size of a real cart
The M3 i have is a ridiculous size , but the mini and micro versions are much closer to the size of a real cart

I have one of these:

It has a 1GB mini SD card in it, almost certainly still full of various incarnations of the Harvest Moon series. I can't find the mini-sd card adaptor for it, though, but they are cheap to pick up. I don't know how it does with the Mac, but I assume it must work as I don't recall having a PC. maybe Craig set it up for me, though. I have no idea.

if you know better than I do and it is any good to you just holler and I'll stick it in the post as it is no good to me as I don't have a GBA slot in my DS. There's an accompanying Datel max Media Launcher with it as well, but I doubt that will be any use to you if you don't have a DS.

What happened to your DS screen, Zaphod?

I have the M3 - in the tin it came in was a separate "GBA micro" style cartridge which I finally got round to fitting and it sits in the micro very nicely. Definitely a great little console - tiny, and with a flash cart you can carry masses of games around with no need to charge every few hours (which is the ipod's achilles heel, not that it stops it being great, just means that having both is the ideal combo).

Its just the reflection of the badly put on screen protector , screens are fine (and thats an old picture from a few years ago) - its getting its first real workout now in ages since the new Professor Layton came out.

Your M3 is the updated version of mine and was what i was suggesting for Dr Lave but was having problems finding somewhere which still sells it.

Looks more like its got smallpox.

It got upgraded to Micropox.

Wow! that would be amazing Mimi, du bist awesome.

I'll send you a PM.

No problem