brojamfootball Posted October 14, 2012 Share Posted October 14, 2012 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... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rex Dart Posted October 14, 2012 Share Posted October 14, 2012 (edited) 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 October 14, 2012 by Rex Dart Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brojamfootball Posted October 14, 2012 Author Share Posted October 14, 2012 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! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rex Dart Posted October 14, 2012 Share Posted October 14, 2012 Raspberry Pi or similar, maybe? GBA should be fun enough, though. There's SMS/GG & GB emulation available on it, too. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brojamfootball Posted October 14, 2012 Author Share Posted October 14, 2012 Exactamundo! And decent old ports would be good enuff for this scheme, fer sher. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Satoshi Matrix Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 Here's the best GBA flashcart out there. Enjoy. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldenegg Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NinjaWarrior Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 I wanted to try Pocket NES and SMS Advance to see how good is it.. It dosn't run on VisualBoyAdvance Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldenegg Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 I wanted to try Pocket NES and SMS Advance to see how good is it.. It dosn't run on VisualBoyAdvance There are several YouTube videos showing the emulators. Don't expect much from either. The GBA is too slow to properly emulate either system with much precision. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Gemintronic Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 I don't remember having probs with SMS Advance on a real GBA. PocketNES had some graphical problems. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Rex Dart Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 Yeah, the master system's screen fit within the GBA's screen resolution, but the NES has to be altered... lines dropped or squished. Made text hard to read sometimes, but performance was good. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldenegg Posted October 15, 2012 Share Posted October 15, 2012 Both emulators require frameskip to play properly. Some people (like myself) notice the skip and find it very annoying, while others don't. There are many better ways to emulate both systems on portable devices. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
gtmtnbiker Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 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? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldenegg Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 There are several games that don't work properly on the M3. The Lego Star Wars games are good examples. You can't complete either due to game stopping glitches. It would also be nice to eventually have a GBA flash cart that supports Fat32 and SDHC. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Reaperman Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Satoshi Matrix Posted October 18, 2012 Share Posted October 18, 2012 [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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2600 Posted October 24, 2012 Share Posted October 24, 2012 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brojamfootball Posted October 25, 2012 Author Share Posted October 25, 2012 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
goldenegg Posted October 25, 2012 Share Posted October 25, 2012 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. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
brojamfootball Posted October 25, 2012 Author Share Posted October 25, 2012 Awesome! Thank you! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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