Chances are we've all heard of those Pokemon games and such that are just a rom dump on an unofficial cartridge.
For the sake of curiosity hat I'd like to know is: How are they made in the first place? How did someone put a rom onto a real cartridge like that?
Furthermore, how did they make a cartridge look at least somewhat convincing and compatible with the hardware?
I did some Googling and all the results were about how to spot one of these bootlegs, and nothing about their actual origin.
Could you help me out in my quest for knowledge?
Well, they just write to some rom chips that imitate the GBA ROM and put it on a board that goes to the GBA, it's not like gameboy cartridges are made by nintendo-dust only nintendo has.
ROMs aren't strictly read only, they just write very slowly and have a rather limited number of write cycles before they are rendered useless
[QUOTE=Fatfatfatty;46712107]ROMs aren't strictly read only, they just write very slowly and have a rather limited number of write cycles before they are rendered useless[/QUOTE]
So, you can boot up a real GBA game as much as you want, but a rom dump cart you can only boot so many times before it doesn't work anymore?
I never knew that...
[QUOTE=Nightscout;46712181]So, you can boot up a real GBA game as much as you want, but a rom dump cart you can only boot so many times before it doesn't work anymore?
I never knew that...[/QUOTE]
I said write cycles, not read cycles. The game only reads from rom when its in the console, it never tries to write to the rom.
I dunno, but they make buying GBA games off of Ebay one heck of a pain in the arse, if you aren't too careful.
Luckily I haven't run into any fakes yet, but it's always possible it could happen.
I had a Game Boy Advance cartridge once with like 100 games on it. Didn't realize at the time that it was a pirate cartridge from like China.
It went missing a few years after I got it, dunno where it ended up.
[QUOTE=Fatfatfatty;46712195]I said write cycles, not read cycles. The game only reads from rom when its in the console, it never tries to write to the rom.[/QUOTE]
Except for saving, I presume?
[editline]16th December 2014[/editline]
Also why would you NOT want a bootleg version?
If they put the same rom on the cartridge then what's the problem?
[QUOTE=MyAlt91;46724993]Except for saving, I presume?
[editline]16th December 2014[/editline]
Also why would you NOT want a bootleg version?
If they put the same rom on the cartridge then what's the problem?[/QUOTE]
Why would it try to save to the ROM? no games write back to ROM to save.
they save to memory included specifically for saving, usually some kind of flash chip, rarely battery-backed SRAM in the gba's case.
and usually the hardware in the card is cheaply made, so it has a much higher chance of failing much earlier.
I kind of want to buy a bootleg Famicom game, just for the novelty of it.
I almost fell for a fake cartridge for Duke Nukem on the Game Boy Color.
The way I knew it was fake was that there was no "Nintendo" on the top, it was a gray original Game Boy cartridge, and it had a fake ESRB rating on it, saying it was rated E for Everyone. The real game is rated T.
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