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GBA Flash Carts, NES Emu info please


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Hey gang,

I just upgraded my old beatup Coleco Donkey Kong tabletop with a nice, minty one from craigslist and am finally ready to frankenstein mod the old one.

My plan is to put a GBA SP inside, making it more of what us 1980s kids dreamed these machines would be.

 

Sooo, I can just do that and use GBA carts, but a flash cart with multiple games would really kick it up a notch, esp if I could run a NES emu on it--NES really had some nice arcade ports, and now, most importantly, the NES Donkey Kong Complete rom with all 4 screens! That would really make this a dream machine!

 

I did one a few years ago with 1 of those Excalibur Frogger tabletops, putting guts from a cheap Chinese multigame inside and it came out great, but the screen is a bit small, game selection blows...anyway, I want to top that and really go for the gusto this time.

 

Anybody got good advice on which flash cart to buy? NES emulation and possibly also oldschool GB and GB Color compatibility would be the biggest considerations.

 

Thanks in 'advance' har-har...

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Really, you'd be better off putting old netbook guts inside. NES emulation on the GBA isn't all there. It works, sure, but the screen is compressed / has missing lines to accommodate the different resolution of the GBA screen.

 

Here's the GBA cart I see recommended a lot, and here's your emulator.

Edited by Rex Dart
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For sure, but a Netbook would hardly fit, and would be WAY tougher to do.

NES emulation would likely be good enough for the simple arcade ports I think. VAST upgrade over the tabletop's VFD stuff, for sure anyway.

It worked good enough some years ago to do SMB for me, but I no longer have that stuff.

Anyway, muchas gracias!

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I wouldn't consider the M3 to be the best GBA flash cart. I own quite a few and that one's average at best. Game compatibility is all over the place and it doesn't fit flush in the system (which is quite annoying on the GB Micro). The EZ-Flash IV is pretty much the best you'll find right now, with the Neo Flash carts being the worst. I'm hoping Krikzz makes a GBA flash cart in the future, as there's definitely room for improvement.

 

The absolute best flash option for GBA games is actually for the DS. It's a combination of the Acekard 2i, EZ-Flash 3-in-1 and the AKAIO flashcard software.

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I wouldn't consider the M3 to be the best GBA flash cart. I own quite a few and that one's average at best. Game compatibility is all over the place and it doesn't fit flush in the system (which is quite annoying on the GB Micro).

 

I never had any trouble with my M3 Perfect SD. Which games did you have issues with?

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Game compatibility is all over the place and it doesn't fit flush in the system (which is quite annoying on the GB Micro). The EZ-Flash IV is pretty much the best you'll find right now, with the Neo Flash carts being the worst.

From the 2nd revision of M3 mini-sd on, the m3 sits flush. (I've had a couple versions) There are indeed more than a few compatibility issues--IIRC that GTA game never worked right on them, but EZ-Flash IV lacks support for any 256mbit game, so I'd rank them pretty even. M3 compatibility naturally goes way down if they're run through the m3 software to be patched for real-time-save, cheating, etc. Being a GBA-MP based device, the media playback was pretty nice too.

 

For emulator support the M3 is pretty good. They have a version of many of the big emulators built right in, so for example, nes roms can be dropped in directly and executed from the game menu. Emulator was also upgradable by dropping a new version (named very specifically) in a certain folder--maybe root for all I remember. M3 was the best card IMO, but it was an expensive beast.

 

True, EZF IV is about the best anymore. I don't think I've ever tried an emulator on mine, though. Maybe they're built into firmware there too.

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[Referring to the M3 Perfect SD] Game compatibility is all over the place and it doesn't fit flush in the system (which is quite annoying on the GB Micro).

 

On your first point, WHAT? I've owned my m3 perfect for years and have NEVER encountered any GBA game that doesn't play perfectly except for the Boukai sun sensor titles and Wario Ware Twisted for obvious reasons. Maybe you've played an earlier version that the one I have. Game compatibility is 99.9%.

 

To your second point, that's an extremely minor complaint. The M3 sticks out only as much as the Play-Yan. If it were the size of a DMG GameBoy cart, I could see people complaining about the size, but it's literally only a few millimeters longer than a stock cart.

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The annoying thing about the EZ Flash emulation is that you have to append roms to a main rom file, using the PC emulator tool. Most emu's run okay on it though, but sifting through the games and appending them as I said are a huge pain in the butt. M3 Perfect is impossible to find, especially cheap. It was for some reason a very small production run.

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Just bought the EZ Flash IV.

Thanks to everyone for the info.

Wish me luck on the mod!

I'm gonna make a new thread when I get going on it.

 

Now that GBATEMP is offline (they were hacked), you might run in to problems finding a download of the latest firmware. If that happens, shoot me a PM and I'll send it to you.

 

Also, keep in mind that you need to flash the firmware first before the cart will do anything. Many people get their cart and complain that it's broken, as they only get a black screen. You simply need to put the firmware on your mini SD cart and hold the right trigger while powering on. That will start the flashing process.

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