GBA Link Cable Dumper

[Sierron]

Even if, you would need to buy an adapter which is most likely more expensive than just getting that gba<->gamecube cable.

[novenary]

It should be much faster though. Integration into emGBA has been discussed before.

[Extrems]

Even dumping through the Game Boy Player with Game Boy Interface is much faster, and could be made really fast.

This could be sped up too with custom joybus commands.

[GreyRogue]

Have you considered adapting this to work with the "advanced game port"? Unlike the GBP, the AVP is software based emulation, the hardware it comes with seems to dump the rom on some way to the GameCube before booting, it also read and writes the save to the cart. Being able to dump to sd would be great and much faster than using the link cable. Also, GB and GBC could work if software emulation licencing is it's only excuse for incompatibility.

https://www.gc-forever.com/wiki/index.p ... _Game_Port

If you're interested, I already did this.
https://www.gc-forever.com/forums/viewt ... tel#p28435
The link describes the protocol the AGP uses and has example code for dumping GBA games and saves, and writing the saves back. It only took a couple of seconds to dump 4MB games.

I could only get it to work for GB (GBA works for everything I tested) games that don't have an MBC (32KB max size=Tetris or Tennis for example). I didn't have sufficient control of the lines to set the MBC registers without resetting the cart. There were a couple of holes in the command list, though, so maybe one of those would have done it.

Also, I had some information there and in a different thread for dumping Datel discs if you're interested in that.

[TuskenTimeTraveller]

Hi, I know this may be old, but I can’t get the thing to work, I insert the cartridge, press A and it says “Waiting for GBA”. Nothing happens. Am I not waiting enough or something else?

[EpicTheBoss]

Software works well. Loving the cheap dumping, since I don't want to shell out $50 to get a USB one.

[Papy.G]

Have you considered adapting this to work with the "advanced game port"? Unlike the GBP, the AVP is software based emulation, the hardware it comes with seems to dump the rom on some way to the GameCube before booting, it also read and writes the save to the cart. Being able to dump to sd would be great and much faster than using the link cable. Also, GB and GBC could work if software emulation licencing is it's only excuse for incompatibility.

Yes it is software-based emulation, but proof has to be provided that the whole rom is read at once and cached into the GC's RAM on booting the game. That would implies some of the bigger games aren't supported, since the maximum GBA Rom size exceeds the GC's RAM.

Incompatibility with GB/GBC is not a licencing issue, but physical, hardware difference, the GBA hardware had features to convolute this problem and provide retro-compatibility with such hardware specificities. It may be that the AGP can, but is very unlikely, since it would have cost more to design and produce, for a feature that would not have been eventually used.

[Rydberg]

Thanks FIX94, I really like this dumper. It's cool that I can make my own ROMs now.
But might it be possible to write to those cheap chinese GBA cartridges like the joey-joebags can do? It would be really cool if I could make my own physical GBA game

[Papy.G]

I'm afraid the GBA won't be able to write to the Rom area in a cart.

Although the bus differs much from the GB/GBC, so I hope I'm wrong.

[Extrems]

A GBA certainly could do that.

[count.zero]

I had a flash cart for GBA with a custom cable to connect the GBA thru his link port to a PC parallel port. It was slooooow and, IIRC you can only put one game at time.