Hacking EZ-FLASH Reform announced

[Jayro]

Consider me hyped. Keep it at $40 or below and I'll buy.

 

[ov3rkill]

I'm just going to wait for reviews and pricing on this one. Looking forward to this product.

 

[console]

Wow! That is nice! But I bought my Krikzz GBA Everdrive X5 flashcart (Deluxe Edition) from stoneagegamer website about 3 months ago and have 3 years warranty. I read on internet about EverDrive-GB flashcart is too limited features, but I'm happy went to have GBA Everdrive X5 flashcart instead because features have added to setting and can do x2 speed like overclock CPU to speed up old Gameboy and Gameboy Color games to faster to reduce my wait time is way to go. Only best for RPG games (Final Fantasy, Pokemon, etc) must speed up faster than normal time and wait for battle to finish them to reduce our boring time. Battery in GBA Everdrive X5 flashcart is very easy to replace, do not need to solder to remove again, again.

If my GBA Everdrive X5 flashcart give up or become defect, I will contact stoneagegamer for replace my flashcart for free because have 3 years warranty is big deal than 1 year or no warranty.

But sad don't have 2x or more faster for GBA games to speed up, but I want it have faster or overclock CPU speed in flashcard would be awesome to finish different game much faster than normal time.

DS and 3DS flashcards need have powerful CPU to speed up DS or 3DS game like 2x or 3x or 4x speed would make more customer get more happy than old flashcard that don't have speed features in speed to control CPU what they want to play on normal speed or fast speed or super faster speed on any games they want to.

Gateway 3DS, Sky3DS+ and other old flashcarts don't have feature to change speed settings, but they are still old setting on normal speed only are based on 1x by default setting.

If what Krikzz release out own DS and 3DS flashcard in near future if have speed setting is saved in .txt format on SD card to let flashcard CPU read codes then decide to speed up (2x or more) or stay on normal speed - default is 1x speed like something that in each line compare to Sky3DS have .txt on SD card.

That is why all companies need to move on and work on new flashcart with faster CPU with new speed setting features for all system in near future. Speed up games will be great to reduce our boring time like old school gaming.

 

[CaptainSodaPop]

I was opening my Micro SD version EZ Flash IV few days ago to check out what kind of battery I have inside and I barely managed to close it again, had to use tape lol. Incredibly cheap design and just glued together poorly. The small tab that should click inside basically does nothing on to keep it tight together, it pops out by itself after few seconds because it's too small and cartridge mold was made from cheap plastic.

Good thing they made this one from better quality by the looks, but they should have done that from the start.

 

[CrakrHakr666]

Now I feel old-school. I just recently replaced the battery in my M3 micro. I never got a newer cart because of lack of RTC.

 

[cearp]

@console - the only reason the gba everdrive can 'speed up' old gb games is because it's emulating them.
if you emulate, you can do that.

on the 3ds, we don't emulate 3ds games, so you can't really compate gateway or ds flashcarts, with that speed up ability, it's not the same.

 

[NANASHI89]

Will it play games that use RTC, and will it play Mother 3?

Sent from my SM-T280 using Tapatalk

 

[Xathya]

3ds++++++++++++++

 

[fst312]

I thought they announced they were making this months ago or was that a different one.

 

[Harsky]

I still own the original EZF IV and from my understanding, is this just still the same thing but with the ability to expand the memory to a bigger size and the addition of two empty case to use on GBA or DS Lite?

 

[FAST6191]

I did remember back to the DS lite days and people complaining bitterly when their flash cart did not replicate a dust cover, and then when these new GBA sized batches started appearing there was not a peep from said crowd.

Will it play games that use RTC, and will it play Mother 3?

Probably not with RTC, though there are always patches. Mother 3 should work as it has on the others, I would hope they got whatever write/size issues sorted (apparently it was a few updates back but I never had it on any of mine). I imagine this is probably a respin of one of the EZ4 lite models with a coin cell holder rather than a directly tab soldered battery and a couple of interchangeable injection moulded cases for both styles of GBA slot.

I am a bit concerned about the battery switch-up, though; easily replaceable is great, and the CR1220 is gonna be a lot easier to fit into a Lite shell, but it's also got a quarter of the capacity of a 2025 at best. Even with a reduction in power consumption, you'd probably end up swapping it out semi-regularly.

Seemed like a good thought exercise
https://www.digikey.co.uk/product-d...nc/IS62C1024AL-35QLI-TR/706-1308-1-ND/4733138
Longer form if you want https://www.digikey.co.uk/products/...t=0&page=1&quantity=0&ptm=0&fid=0&pageSize=25

Random 1 megabit SRAM chip, I will assume it is going to be similar for most.
CMOS Standby is a bit hazy and seemingly measured at 5V seems to be in the order of 5 micro amps.
Another from another manufacturer is similar

http://data.energizer.com/pdfs/cr1220.pdf (energizer, so nothing special and available in real world shops in the UK at time of writing).

Capacity reckons 40 mAh (to 2.0 volts)

Fancier in the likes of http://uk.rs-online.com/web/p/coin-button-batteries/4574713/ clocks even lower.

Anyway
https://www.digikey.com/en/resources/conversion-calculators/conversion-calculator-battery-life
Reckons 5600 hours which is some 233 days.
Not amazing actually.

 

[Sketchy1]

People still use flashcards fo gba?

 

[FAST6191]

People still use flashcards fo gba?

It is a fine way of experiencing GBA games -- cheap, easy, accurate, able to use modified games (cheats or ROM bothering hacks), able to store many games and long established.

 

[cearp]

I still own the original EZF IV and from my understanding, is this just still the same thing but with the ability to expand the memory to a bigger size and the addition of two empty case to use on GBA or DS Lite?

Yes, that is all. Not that it's useless, because it's good for new buyers.

 

[slaphappygamer]

People still use flashcards fo gba?

Heck yeah!

 

[Todderbert]

People still use flashcards fo gba?

yeah for games like Pokemon My Ass... , but seriously I still play my GBA and love having a collection of games on one cart. There are so many good games for the GBA. Using an original SP AGS101 is the best experience vs any other devices or emulators imho. I'm actually going to replay Mario & Luigi Superstar Saga after playing out the 3DS one..and get into the fan translated Fire Emblem Six, Binding Blade title. There's the remastered Final Fantasy games I have to try out also.

 

[Zense]

Probably not with RTC, though there are always patches.
[...]
Reckons 5600 hours which is some 233 days.
Not amazing actually.

So I guess I'm completely off then, since I thought the battery was needed for rtc games? What happens when the battery runs dry?

 

[Searinox]

It's a confusing hybrid system. Since the cart takes microSD ROMs it either stores -all- its save files on battery-backed SRAM or only the current running title, and does some sort of dump on next restart or ROM change. Depending on how it's done, battery death will result in the loss of all saves, current ROM, or inability to further save on played titles. The battery life, if true, is also disappointing since original titles' batteries last some 20 years and we have smaller and less power demanding chips nowadays, the tech is old and I'd expect efficiency.

In contrast, FRAM-based savechips keep the speed of SRAM chips while being non-volatile and so requiring no power source. And have become widely available. Some flashcarts already use them. To see an old-time professional flashcart maker opt out of such an opportunity disappoints me.

 

[FAST6191]

So I guess I'm completely off then, since I thought the battery was needed for rtc games? What happens when the battery runs dry?

General idea.
Reprogramming a game to speak to SD or something is hard, programming a FPGA or something to emulate SRAM, EEPROM and Flash, and all the sub types of each of those, and transparently sort it all behind the scenes is not so bad these days (I believe it is what the everdrive does) but at the time represented something more tricky.
Patching a game to use a different type of save however is very easy, especially on a PC where searching a 32 meg file (practically a lot less than that) for an ASCII string is nothing. On a GBA it is harder which is why we tended only to see it on the DS or more recently with the updates we saw for it.
For whatever reason SRAM was chosen as the thing what gets to be patched to use (hence the term SRAM patch). Nintendo, or whomever developed their carts, actually switched to something called FRAM/FeRAM a year or two into the GBA lifetime and dropped the need for batteries to cover the SRAM. I don't know why flash carts did not follow then or some time later.
SRAM in most forms is noted as needing power to retain the data, hence the battery providing an independent source of it while the cart is not powered.

When the battery dies* the data is no longer held during power down states. If your save is still there it will then not be there for long**. You can try force resetting the cart while it is still on. See the asterisk below but you can possibly just flick the power on and off and have it write back. So yeah you can still save but if you do the normal thing of play a game, save, turn it off and carry on with life it is going to trouble you.

*there is a difference between dies and dies completely. Or if you prefer you have probably had a laptop battery, toothbrush, drill... that was unusable for task but still made a token effort to power lights or move or something. It really is micro amps though to retain data so while it may not even vaguely power a tiny LED it may still be enough for this. Battery draining is not an exact concept, especially at really low draws like this and I don't know what voltage is needed either (if you saw that PDF there would have been nice graphs/plots on there, though the energizer one was more simple than we usually see) but what I did above was good enough for a first pass/back of the envelope thing.

**length of retention upon losing power is often measured in seconds, up to around 20 in some temperatures you might experience (even colder is even longer, hence the cheesy hacker film thing (and sort of real life thing) of spraying RAM with canned air to cool it and lifting it out of the machine to read.

 

[Searinox]

Nintendo, or whomever developed their carts, actually switched to something called FRAM/FeRAM a year or two into the GBA lifetime and dropped the need for batteries to cover the SRAM. I don't know why flash carts did not follow then or some time later.

Did they? Games like Pokemon use Flash and EEPROM for saving but I don't recall them ever using FRAM. Flash/EEP are considerably slower.