GBA SRAM dumper/flasher

[ThunderClaw]

Does anyone know of a GBA utility that would allow one to dump the SRAM and flash it back onto the cart in a NON-ENCRYPTED, NON-BULLSHIT format?

Those two adjectives rule out the GameShark connector, which uses a homosauce proprietary format that commits suicide if you try to use it with basically anything, not the least of which is VBA.

Does the Pro Action Replay connector mangle the saves the same way? Does anyone have first hand experience?

[PHoNyMiKe]

I have a usb flash linker I can use to dump/write sram. keyword sram. if the cart has eeprom or flash, that's a little different and will require some custom code.

if you have a flash cart you can make custom code to read the flash/eeprom and write it to sram on your flash cart then dump it to a computer.

or run an emulator and edit the file it output. typically sram is standard
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

eeprom and flah can be swapped like
5 6 7 8 1 2 3 4

which is how the game accesses it anyways.

[ThunderClaw]

Yeah flash carts are a bit out of my financial realm right now unfortunately. Does this linker you're talking about work with production carts? And if so, how much is it? I'm not too worried about custom code with other storage mediums as long as I can reprogram the linker as needed.

[PHoNyMiKe]

again the #1 key here is sram. if you're 100% positive , make that 157% positive it's sram, then it's pretty easy. most commercial carts don't use sram. my usb linker reads the sram of any cart (flash or commercial) because sram is just like reading rom. but it's not very easy to 'modify the linker' whatever that may mean cause it's usb.

I do have an old parallel port linker that will work no prob, and there's simple C source code called FLinker that can access flash and commercial carts through the parallel linker. $20 you can have it no power supply.

the author of no$gba made a program called xboo, that is a simple db25 connector and a gba cable that can upload multiboot programs to a gba. it sends a small gba program to the gba that can communicate back from the pc. it comes with a bios dumper, which should be easilly modifyable to dump sram and upload to computer.

side note there's a guy on gbadev.org who's gonna put an order in for flash carts to some place. $9 a piece and comes with one cable that allows the pc to tell the gba to program it. so you could pick up a flash cartridge cheap as hell (128mbit I think) and do this shit. I ordered 8.

you're being to vague though, like you want to hack sram of a game cart? do it in an emulator. you want to flash a cart once, send it to me and I'll do it. it all depends on what you want to do. but if you want to spend $0 and don't know much about the gba, then there's not much you can do.

[ThunderClaw]

but it's not very easy to 'modify the linker' whatever that may mean cause it's usb.

yeah i was meaning to ask if you could fuck with the driver easily, some hardware lets you some hardware doesnt.

I do have an old parallel port linker that will work no prob, and there's simple C source code called FLinker that can access flash and commercial carts through the parallel linker. $20 you can have it no power supply.

what is the power supply specs on that thing, i can see if i can find a proper generic at radioshack or something

side note there's a guy on gbadev.org who's gonna put an order in for flash carts to some place. $9 a piece and comes with one cable that allows the pc to tell the gba to program it. so you could pick up a flash cartridge cheap as hell (128mbit I think) and do this shit. I ordered 8.

holy fuck that's pretty nice, but some asshole mod nazied the link. how do i get in on that, just order 3 or whatever from the dude and pay him back later?

you're being to vague though, like you want to hack sram of a game cart? do it in an emulator.

yeah that's pretty much what i want to do, i want to be able to throw saves back and forth from a GBA to my laptop on commercial carts. i use the two almost interchangably anymore since my laptop has more or less all my work on it. plus there's just a lot of shit that's a lot easier to do in an emulator, and i can hack shit if i want to.

so i'd like to get the save from the cartridge, do whatever i want to it in an emulator, save, and send it back.

i'm not afraid of spending a little money, but from what i knew of a flash cart was like 50 bucks for the low end shit, no linker, no software, no nothing like that, which is kind of out of my price range because the whole thing would end up being 80-100 bucks easy. if you can get some flash carts from that one guy in the topic you linked that cheap though, i'll just do that.