gbaldr+szcard patch version 4.

i hate blogs for projects. you always read these and are like, okay lovely changes but what is the program to begin with?

gbaldr is a program for the EZ FLASH 3-in-1 to write gameboy advance roms to a flash memory cartridge in the slot2 of your nintendo ds. it of course requires a way to launch .nds (usually a slot-1 hacker card). this is a patch so that it works with the "Fire Linker 128Mbit" aka SZcard, currently being sold on dealextreme. out of the box it requires you to find some warez program if you don't read chinese, and also a parallel port, and a GBA to program your card. this program makes it very easy if you already have a DS and a slot-1 and are looking to add GBA ROMs to your playlist. :)

version 1-3 probably shouldn't have gotten numbers, but was uploading lil changes to the development forum for people to test out and wanted a way to be able to tell if they were using the right #... so here's version 4, the first one worth a download.

gbaldr-szcard4: binary and source.

Charging Batteries

so i was reading up on how to charge batteries and went to take my battery charger apart... and realized when i was drunk this weekend i put normal alkaline AA's in my NiMH charger. i felt them, they weren't warm... they did not explode... maybe i was lucky, but they were at a healthy 1.72 V!
i won't go into details but it's possible to charge them. a couple manufacturers make chargers for normal batteries, and some people call them scams. of course, it works, but it's not ideal. they apparently don't charge many times (on the order of ten times vs hundreds), and alkaline can't be charged quickly either. luckily/probably my charger was smart enough to sense 'fast-charge' was done very early in this charging process, and it used a more nominal current. otherwise, i'm just lucky they didn't explode? either way, nothing i'd do on the norm, but it's obviously got me a bit excited. :)
also, i did not notice if the charge light was off (i unplugged it before looking), nor did i get a before reading on the voltage, but they definitely didn't have enough juice for my digital camera... but then again, digital cameras draw more current and are better suited for NiMH than alkaline. again, your mileage may vary, but worth a mention.

SZcard

I bought a cheap gameboy advance flashcart on dealextreme[pic] for $9.21 with free shipping. I also have a EZ FLASH 3-in-1, it's $20 and it's great, but this would be to loan to friends or even give away...

It's 128Mbit (16MiB) and has some SRAM (256KB). The problem? Parallel port linker which required a GBA! Your PC uses the GBA to actually program it. My solution? Write a small program to do that for ya... Too bad I had no information on this cart besides it says "SZcard ver.1" on the PCB.

I found a forum where someone did a large quantity order and distributed them, here.

I won't link to my lil test app, because i change it a lot to test other things and such so it's not at a great state, but the my latest build of gbaldr patched to work on this card is below.

now if someone could send me a dump of the menu that's written to it with SPLINK then I can also add multi-boot capabilities and be motivated to make gbaldr actually work better... right now, your saves will not be backed up. actually when you right this build, first thing it does is kill your SRAM because bank switching is not available yet. sorry.

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gbaldr v0.1 + szcard patch (build 1)