This was exactly what i was looking for! I was also curious to see whether or not they would work with pal park. The main important thing is for the cart to have flash memory in order to do so, right? Since there is a decent price tag change between RTC and No RTC, RTC should not affect this right and is only for the berry growing? Tip: change your video title to Assembling an InsideGadgets GBA Flash Cart for Pal Park/Dual-Slot mode, I think a lot of people are looking for this kind of information! :D
I added a ton of tags to this video so searching that should still yield this video. And yeah, RTC should only affect the actual in-game play. The important part for the palpark compatibility is that the game header is correct and the actual save is readable (so if the save hardware is different than what is expected, the save will not be readable).
Pretty sure any US-based version (like German, French, Italian or so) would work with US DS games since their save data are compatible (unless the game was checking for the header, but that would be bad for many EUR players who would often have different languages in different games). JP and US are not, mostly because US ones allow for longer names - JP Pokemon names, for example, use 5 maximum of characters, while for US and others it's 10. If you put a JP save on an US rom (either in emulator or on a DS using a save transfer app), it would often work, but would glitch a lot.
I once put a US save on a JP Ruby and used that to transfer a JP exclusive Pokemon from a GameCube game. That seemed to work fine. I dunno why Emerald had a conniption. But regardless, I believe the gen 4 game reads the header of the gen 3 game and if they are from different regions, it will reject the import. I don't have anything other than NA/US gen 4 games and NA/US and JP gen 3 games to test it out with though. Well, I suppose I could get a gen 3 ROM now...
Some pokemon gba bootlegs are made to have the sav game built into the rom, they create the save file once you load the game, but it's weirdly enough inside the rom. Dumped one and was like wtf it creates a save file with data even though I hadn't yet dumped its sav...
That is precisely why Pal Park would not work on those. They do have physical SRAM memory, which is backed up onto flash memory when saving and restored when booting, but there's no battery meaning the DS game will see the SRAM being empty. Theoretically adding a battery would keep the save and make it able to transfer, but some carts need to be slightly modified first and many of those have SRAM smaller than needed, so might not be detected as well.
@@AtoManPL I can't dump nor insert saves into that card. I can dump the rom which is 32mb btw instead of 16mb... I put that rom into the emu and it generates its own save file fom within the rom.
@@elModo7 Indeed. You can't dump a save because it gets erased the moment you turn off the console, just like a legit game does when battery dies. The rom itself has a code hacked in so it restores the save once it boots, but that doesn't happen without running the game itself. The .sav file that a dump generates once you run it on the emulator can be flashed onto a legit game, though :P
@@AtoManPL GBA games use either SRAM/FRAM, EEPROM, or Flash saving (to my knowledge) and the protocols required for interfacing with each is different. This means that a game designed for one type of save hardware will not work with another. There is, however, a patch tool (GBATA) that will allow a EEPROM or Flash game to save to SRAM/FRAM. Long story short though, the gen 4 Pokemon games were likely only designed to interface with the original flash memory and couldn't interface with the SRAM/FRAM even if they were recognized and had a save.
@@elModo7 Most bootlegs have two different patches working together. The first is to allow the game to save to the SRAM memory instead of the default flash (or EEPROM depending on the game). The next patch is specific to the exact hardware that the game is going to be written to. This patch allows the game to read a specific portion of memory (on the "ROM" chip) and write that memory to the SRAM on startup. This patch also copies the SRAM to that particular portion of memory (again, on the "ROM" chip) every time the save protocols are invoked. This effectively allows the carts to use the cheaper SRAM but without a battery at all. The biggest downside to this method is that it's really difficult, borderline impossible to manually patch it in. If you ever reflash your game, you'll likely never have batteryless saving working again. Another issue is that interrupted or low power writes can corrupt the memory. This means that instead of losing your save data if you power down at the wrong time (or even just try to save on a low battery), you risk making the cart completely unbootable. And finally, as you mentioned, most SRAM chips only go up to 512K instead of the 1M that is required for Pokemon games. When working with only 512K, the game will probably work fine until you beat the elite four. At that point, you will run out of available save memory and the save will corrupt. As far as injecting and dumping saves, well to dump the save, you just need to dump the ROM and then boot the ROM in an emulator. It will extract the save automatically and then you can go from there. If you want to inject a save though, you'll need to dump the ROM, open the file in a hex editor, and manually find and insert your save. I've yet to get this working myself.
Hey can you make a video how to write a game in the cartridge because a bought one with the chip already installed and everytime I tried to write or read the cartridge I only get a logo failed, my cartridge came with demo game. I'm using the GBxCart RW. Thank you for your great job.
@@makho I tried everything and nothing, I think the cart is damage, because I took a picture and when I zoom it I can see a little bend on one leg of the chip.
@@ebgarcia1281 Hi there, could you please contact us at support@insidegadgets.com with a picture of the cart and a screenshot of the console flasher interface when trying to flash a rom? If you receive logo check failed, you might have to re-seat the cartridge. You can slowly adjust the cartridge while it's on the reader and press read info after each adjustment to see if anything changes.
The part is the same on all five games so whatever is the least expensive. In my case, the least expensive was the one I had on hand. This is totally obsolete now that the newer iG carts just spoof the flash ID though.
A bunch of real and fake pokemon carts and swapping the shells based on quality. Such a collectors problem haha. Do we know if gbata rtc rom hacks still work with pal park?
I haven't tested any ROM hacks in particular but if you can share a save that's far enough in the game I can test something. In theory, it should work for all the basic ROM hacks at least -- the ones that just modify difficulty or pokemon spawns
I think you're right. I was thinking about how the rom hack must use a different save structure to store the timestamp without the rtc, but apparently the stock games also logs the timestamp in save.
@@makho ok then, I'm no expert,but u do very little in the way if explaining why this isn't the case. For u this might be logical, but for the common Joe like me it's a huge pain. U do know that gba fakes have flooded ebay and Amazon. the way I see it u are teaching the scammers how to circumvent ways to tell if a cartridge is fake. Dont know if u came across any bootleg games in the playground growing up, but I did. I had to return 2 pokemon ruby games on ebay cuss they were fakes. Now since u are an expert why not do a vid teaching how to identify this clone cartridges and explaining why the room hacks u make won't end up on the market.
@@archy8822 Archy88 No one is going to buy a real game, remove the ram, resolder the ram to a new board, and then re-sell it as a real game. there are also numerous easy ways to tell real and fake games apart. Your comment just contains completely wrong information based on lack of knowledge, please do your research next time before you go full moron.
@@archy8822 First off, I make the videos I make because I want to make them. No other reason. If they help people, fantastic. If not, I hope they at least entertain or provide some good background noise. I'm not going to start making videos just because you don't want to do your research. Second, as I said in this video and as it says on the product page, these carts are MADE FROM OEM CARTs. Which means there is no way they would be passed off as a cheaper alternative, like all other bootlegs are. If you can get your hands on one of these carts for the price of a bootleg ($5), fucking take it. That's a steal for these. Third, these carts cannot even fit in OEM shells without modification. If you cannot tell the difference between OEM and bootlegs from the shell then you need to do more research. Lastly, I'm not teaching scammers anything. If they want to fix repro carts and make them more functional then that's fine with me. The biggest problem with bootlegs these days is that they do not work like the originals. Also, I think you are greatly insulting a lot of other people by calling yourself "a common joe".
Sealed the deal for me. Purchasing a couple copies when they get back to me about a few questions! This is awesome!!!
This was exactly what i was looking for! I was also curious to see whether or not they would work with pal park. The main important thing is for the cart to have flash memory in order to do so, right? Since there is a decent price tag change between RTC and No RTC, RTC should not affect this right and is only for the berry growing? Tip: change your video title to Assembling an InsideGadgets GBA Flash Cart for Pal Park/Dual-Slot mode, I think a lot of people are looking for this kind of information! :D
I added a ton of tags to this video so searching that should still yield this video. And yeah, RTC should only affect the actual in-game play. The important part for the palpark compatibility is that the game header is correct and the actual save is readable (so if the save hardware is different than what is expected, the save will not be readable).
Thank you very much for the information. Definitely needed it if I'm gonna complete the Pokedex.
Pretty sure any US-based version (like German, French, Italian or so) would work with US DS games since their save data are compatible (unless the game was checking for the header, but that would be bad for many EUR players who would often have different languages in different games). JP and US are not, mostly because US ones allow for longer names - JP Pokemon names, for example, use 5 maximum of characters, while for US and others it's 10. If you put a JP save on an US rom (either in emulator or on a DS using a save transfer app), it would often work, but would glitch a lot.
I once put a US save on a JP Ruby and used that to transfer a JP exclusive Pokemon from a GameCube game. That seemed to work fine. I dunno why Emerald had a conniption. But regardless, I believe the gen 4 game reads the header of the gen 3 game and if they are from different regions, it will reject the import. I don't have anything other than NA/US gen 4 games and NA/US and JP gen 3 games to test it out with though. Well, I suppose I could get a gen 3 ROM now...
Great video as always 👍🏻❤️
Some pokemon gba bootlegs are made to have the sav game built into the rom, they create the save file once you load the game, but it's weirdly enough inside the rom.
Dumped one and was like wtf it creates a save file with data even though I hadn't yet dumped its sav...
That is precisely why Pal Park would not work on those. They do have physical SRAM memory, which is backed up onto flash memory when saving and restored when booting, but there's no battery meaning the DS game will see the SRAM being empty. Theoretically adding a battery would keep the save and make it able to transfer, but some carts need to be slightly modified first and many of those have SRAM smaller than needed, so might not be detected as well.
@@AtoManPL I can't dump nor insert saves into that card. I can dump the rom which is 32mb btw instead of 16mb... I put that rom into the emu and it generates its own save file fom within the rom.
@@elModo7 Indeed. You can't dump a save because it gets erased the moment you turn off the console, just like a legit game does when battery dies. The rom itself has a code hacked in so it restores the save once it boots, but that doesn't happen without running the game itself. The .sav file that a dump generates once you run it on the emulator can be flashed onto a legit game, though :P
@@AtoManPL GBA games use either SRAM/FRAM, EEPROM, or Flash saving (to my knowledge) and the protocols required for interfacing with each is different. This means that a game designed for one type of save hardware will not work with another. There is, however, a patch tool (GBATA) that will allow a EEPROM or Flash game to save to SRAM/FRAM.
Long story short though, the gen 4 Pokemon games were likely only designed to interface with the original flash memory and couldn't interface with the SRAM/FRAM even if they were recognized and had a save.
@@elModo7 Most bootlegs have two different patches working together. The first is to allow the game to save to the SRAM memory instead of the default flash (or EEPROM depending on the game). The next patch is specific to the exact hardware that the game is going to be written to. This patch allows the game to read a specific portion of memory (on the "ROM" chip) and write that memory to the SRAM on startup. This patch also copies the SRAM to that particular portion of memory (again, on the "ROM" chip) every time the save protocols are invoked. This effectively allows the carts to use the cheaper SRAM but without a battery at all.
The biggest downside to this method is that it's really difficult, borderline impossible to manually patch it in. If you ever reflash your game, you'll likely never have batteryless saving working again. Another issue is that interrupted or low power writes can corrupt the memory. This means that instead of losing your save data if you power down at the wrong time (or even just try to save on a low battery), you risk making the cart completely unbootable. And finally, as you mentioned, most SRAM chips only go up to 512K instead of the 1M that is required for Pokemon games. When working with only 512K, the game will probably work fine until you beat the elite four. At that point, you will run out of available save memory and the save will corrupt.
As far as injecting and dumping saves, well to dump the save, you just need to dump the ROM and then boot the ROM in an emulator. It will extract the save automatically and then you can go from there. If you want to inject a save though, you'll need to dump the ROM, open the file in a hex editor, and manually find and insert your save. I've yet to get this working myself.
Hello, can you test if these insidegadgets carts can be flashed using a DS and an r4 card with GBABF.nds installed?
A gbxcart rw will be a lot easier
Hey can you make a video how to write a game in the cartridge because a bought one with the chip already installed and everytime I tried to write or read the cartridge I only get a logo failed, my cartridge came with demo game. I'm using the GBxCart RW. Thank you for your great job.
Use the newest console flasher. It takes a long time to write but just set it to the first GBA option and be patient. It will go (eventually).
@@makho I will try, thanks
@@makho I tried everything and nothing, I think the cart is damage, because I took a picture and when
I zoom it I can see a little bend on one leg of the chip.
@@ebgarcia1281 Hi there, could you please contact us at support@insidegadgets.com with a picture of the cart and a screenshot of the console flasher interface when trying to flash a rom? If you receive logo check failed, you might have to re-seat the cartridge. You can slowly adjust the cartridge while it's on the reader and press read info after each adjustment to see if anything changes.
insideGadgets ok I will send you all the information, thank you.
Cool vid, SO SAY WE ALL!
I think fire red/leaf green would be better for these due to lack of RTC
The part is the same on all five games so whatever is the least expensive. In my case, the least expensive was the one I had on hand.
This is totally obsolete now that the newer iG carts just spoof the flash ID though.
Good stuff
A bunch of real and fake pokemon carts and swapping the shells based on quality. Such a collectors problem haha. Do we know if gbata rtc rom hacks still work with pal park?
I haven't tested any ROM hacks in particular but if you can share a save that's far enough in the game I can test something. In theory, it should work for all the basic ROM hacks at least -- the ones that just modify difficulty or pokemon spawns
I think you're right. I was thinking about how the rom hack must use a different save structure to store the timestamp without the rtc, but apparently the stock games also logs the timestamp in save.
its a shame these cant be made as much due to chip shortages.
I believe Alex just announced new versions of these carts a few days ago ;)
Can you RIP the Rom from this ??
I mean, I flashed the ROM in the first place so yeah.
Where do you get core i5 ds ???😆😆😆
you gotta know somebody in the in-crowd. Sorry bub.
so now there is no way to tell fakes and original games apart. congratulations hope u are proud of yourself.
Maybe for morons like you. I hope you're proud of yourself for making the dumbest comment I've read today.
@@makho ok then, I'm no expert,but u do very little in the way if explaining why this isn't the case. For u this might be logical, but for the common Joe like me it's a huge pain. U do know that gba fakes have flooded ebay and Amazon. the way I see it u are teaching the scammers how to circumvent ways to tell if a cartridge is fake. Dont know if u came across any bootleg games in the playground growing up, but I did. I had to return 2 pokemon ruby games on ebay cuss they were fakes. Now since u are an expert why not do a vid teaching how to identify this clone cartridges and explaining why the room hacks u make won't end up on the market.
@@archy8822 Archy88 No one is going to buy a real game, remove the ram, resolder the ram to a new board, and then re-sell it as a real game. there are also numerous easy ways to tell real and fake games apart.
Your comment just contains completely wrong information based on lack of knowledge, please do your research next time before you go full moron.
@@archy8822 First off, I make the videos I make because I want to make them. No other reason. If they help people, fantastic. If not, I hope they at least entertain or provide some good background noise. I'm not going to start making videos just because you don't want to do your research. Second, as I said in this video and as it says on the product page, these carts are MADE FROM OEM CARTs. Which means there is no way they would be passed off as a cheaper alternative, like all other bootlegs are. If you can get your hands on one of these carts for the price of a bootleg ($5), fucking take it. That's a steal for these. Third, these carts cannot even fit in OEM shells without modification. If you cannot tell the difference between OEM and bootlegs from the shell then you need to do more research. Lastly, I'm not teaching scammers anything. If they want to fix repro carts and make them more functional then that's fine with me. The biggest problem with bootlegs these days is that they do not work like the originals.
Also, I think you are greatly insulting a lot of other people by calling yourself "a common joe".
Good job.