Game boy advance sp hack/mod?

[Taera]

I've got an old game boy advance sp that I've been playing lately and I was wondering if there is a way to mod it so that I could play any gba games on it? I soft modded my Wii so I'm not totally unfamiliar with the process but I can't seem to find anything on Google that relates to a similar process for gba. Any help us appreciated. Thanks!

[xopher]

Are you looking for a GBA Flash cart?

e.g. this http://www.r4ds-ds.com/products/EZ-F...-sp-p-239.html

[Taera]

Not sure what it is I'm looking at. Do you flash games onto that cart or the sd card it says it takes?

[Niya]

Guess it works similar to flash cards for NDS. You connect the Micro SD card to your computer and pack kind of a bootloader on it, then put the SD in the flash card and boot from it with your GBA. That prepares the flash card for running game ROMs, this extra step is needed so they can sell the cards without breaking any copyright/hacking laws. The bootloader is most of the time hosted on chinese sites and out of reach for law enforcers.

After that you get your favourite game ROMs from the net and put them on the MicroSD. When you boot the GBA from the flash card it loads a select menu that lets you choose one of the games and play it ^^

[Naggi]

EZ Carts were pretty good - it's what I used for my GBA SP. I had the earliest version which suffered problems with save game memory being wiped every time the cart was removed, but these issues will have been resolved by now!

http://www.ezflash.cn/products.htm

[Tekki]

Have an android phone?

[Taera]

I do, but I prefer using actual buttons instead of a touch screen. A lot of times my fingers aren't always pressing where I think they are and it gets annoying

[hey]

this extra step is needed so they can sell the cards without breaking any copyright/hacking laws. The bootloader is most of the time hosted on chinese sites and out of reach for law enforcers.

That, or because it's cheaper to store it on an sd card that the user is going to provide anyway, than to have it on the card itself (not to mention this allows for updates, etc). The files are hosted on chinese sites because that's where this stuff generally comes from.

Some retailers will include all of the software you need if you purchase an sd card from them. It's not illegal. The code is not copyrighted, except by the people giving it away for free, and at least in this case, there isn't even any hacking being done. The GBA will boot anything you give it.

[Niya]

Like i said, can only speak for NDS flash cards. I still have a GBA card, but that one's from times way before MicroSD where you had to connect the GBA to your PC with a special linker cable and transfer the ROM(s) that way. That thing had "only" 256MB of Flash storage (and that was a large model!) and a buffer battery xD

Anyways, since NDS there is kind of a war between Nintendo and the flash card makers. Nintendo tries to block flash cards through firmware updates, and the flash carders trick around it by taking the bootloader parts from regular games and combining them with their flash card firmware. My R4 3DS disguises itself as a Japanese Spongebob game to get past the blockade. And because of those "stolen" bootloader parts they can't distribute the cards with preloaded firmware.

GBA may be easier for flash cards since there were/are no firmware updates by Nintendo.