GBA Piracy

From PHWiki

GBA Piracy is usually done by either emulating the roms on a PC (or other hardware) or by copying the game roms to a flash card and run them on real hardware.

There are also ways to run DS code using a GBA flash card in a DS, see DS Homebrew.

See Wikipedia:Game Boy Advance flash cartridge for an overview of different brands of flash cards for GBA.

Issues

Issues with flash cards for GBA

Flash chip speed

The GBA expects to execute instructions straight from the ROM chips, so they have to be extremely fast. The GBA also expects to execute instructions starting at any address, not just the beginning of a block. This means that you have to use either NOR chips, or RAM chips. (See NAND and NOR and block device.)

Saving Pirated Roms

Main article: GBA Saves

Original GBA carts use five different types of save chips that fall into three main categories. All have to function for pirated roms to save properly, but emulators and other GBA homebrew programs generally need only SRAM.

Another issue is that some cards combine an RTC (real time clock) with SRAM saving, and when the RTC drains the battery, the saves are lost.