 GBA
Flash Advance Linker
This was one
of the first gba development units out there. Its is no loger
produced and over the years many others have been released and
this "Flash
Linker" is
not sold anymore. Please look at our other reviews to find something
that suits you.
The design of the linker looks a lot like the old GBC rom GBX-changer. Linker
unit uses 25pin male-male cable for the printer port, if you dont have one it
will probably cost you ~10$ to get a new one.
Power for the unit is supplied by 6 AAA batteries or a power supply.
As printer ports differ from one PC to another there are sped
settings in the software to addjast for your. 4 in total. If
the fastest doesnt work - decreas it and it will. Most of the
early gba rom releases / dumps are made using Flash Advance Linker.
Flash Writer software is complicated to say the least. It came
as a fresh breath of ear when the LittleWriter was released.
Later on Little Writer has outgrown FA cards and now supports
a multitude of hardware including GBA X-ROM, XG-Flash, EZ-Flash
etc. GBA flash linker is perfect for home
development and 99% of all the demos in the first 2 years of
The GB Advance were tested on this hardware.
FlashAdvance Cards - the firt version was well the first - and
had problems with speed and the cartridge being oversized. In
addicion to that memory mapping issues made it imposble
to have mor than 4 gba roms on the 256M card at thesame time
and the minimum size of the rom was limited. FA Pro and Turbo
versions were released to fix the problem. These two new versionas
are compatible with the Flash2Advance USB linker and software.
The problem that these cards had were incompatibility with some
of the new save game formats and lack of RealTime Clock so many
games had to be patched to be playable.
+ compatible with LittleWriter
+ best card for PogoShell
+ great compatibly with the older software
+ can be used to play GB and GBC roms
(GB-Bridge compatible)
- many games need patching
- uses printer port connection that many new PC no longer have.
- first generation cards needed speed patching
- power supply o batteries needed for the linker
to operate
Review Flash Advance Linker Features:
Just like a Cradle for your Palm or other Handheld Computer, the
Flash Advance Linker is plugged into the printer port of your PC.
Once connected, it can simply send and receive game ROM data from
or to the plugged in game or Flash Cartridge. With it you can extract
game data from Gameboy Cartridges and save it on your PC as GBA
ROMs or you can use it to send roms you download from the internet
to Flash Advance Card and play them on Gameboy! To operate it requires
6 AAA batteries or any regular 9V adapter.
Writing GBA ROMs to Flash Advance Cards
The best thing about FAL is that it also lets you write Gameboy roms to Flash
Advance Cards! Use the provided software to select ROM files from your harddrive,
and write them through the printer or USB port connected Flash Advance Linker
to the Flash Advance Cartridge. Its just like writing files to ReWritable CD
with a CD-Recorder or sendingt MP3 files from PC to MP3 Player. You can even
save multiple games into one single flash advanc card ! 64M card can hold up
to 2 games, 128M - 4 games, 256M - 8 games, 512M - 16 games. Most Gameboy Advance
games are 32Mbits or 64Mbits big (4 or 8 Mega Bytes on your PC) Reading out GBA game ROMs
When your original Nintendo GBA game has been plugged in to the Flash Advance
Linker, you can use Flash
Advance Writer or LittleWriter software to read out gba rom data and save
it to your local PC harddrive as a ROM file (*.GBA) Flash Advance Linker
also lets you read out the savegame to store it in an extra file - you won't
loose any game data, e.g. when the battery in your original GBA game gets
empty.
Play ROMs from the internet on Gameboy for FREE!
So you download gba roms Freeware,
PD roms or Commercial game roms from internet (just like you would download
MP3s) or backup your Nintendo GB cartridges and using Flash Advance Linker
upload the roms to Flash Advance Card and play them on your Gameboy for FREE!
|
Download
Flash Advance Software
