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You know wich one guys, the chinese ones. Do they still exist? I got two, and a flasher/reader but I´d love to have a third one or even a fourth one for backing up before shows and shit.
Shipping to Spain cant be too expensive from Europe, I guess.
EDIT BECAUSE IM DUMB: I meant smartboys, not smartcarts. Lol, n00b.
Last edited by SuperBustySamuraiMonkey (Sep 23, 2012 2:48 am)
i'll have some soon (pre-owned), just waiting on news from someone about whether they still needed one of the parts,
shipping from us to europe isn't much at all, either
They still exist but they are super hard to get stateside. The only way I know of to get them is a TaoBao proxy service.
If you already own a flasher, the Apeshit Dev Carts are compatible with it. If I recall correctly, they are based on a similar design, except legally produced with higher quality.
Those are probably a lot easier to get, plus you keep the money in the scene. 
produced with higher quality
The bleepbloop carts had gold plated and bezeled edge connectors, they were higher quality.
the smart card requires the ems flasher, the carts are not compatable with the same flasher. However both flasher are compatable with backing up the save from either or from their own.
The smart cards can still be gotten straight from hk ems and at a reasonable price. have you checked out their site?
Edit: d's on that bitch
Last edited by 12ianma (Sep 23, 2012 9:33 am)
Telerophon wrote:produced with higher quality
The bleepbloop carts had gold plated and bezeled edge connectors, they were higher quality.
You're in over your head here, Maize. Might not want to make assumptions like that, because you clearly don't know enough about manufacturing electronics.
Telerophon wrote:produced with higher quality
The smart carts can still be gotten straight from hk ems and at a reasonable price. have you checked out their site?
The issue here, specifically, is semantic: "Smart Cart" is a generalized and colloquial term for a reprogrammable flash cartridge in our dev community / music scene. However, this can easily refer to multiple products with significant technical differences.
I assumed from the wording in the first post that our friend was specifically looking for the "Smartboy 32" flash cartridges, which include their own flasher in the retail packaging – one 32M MBC5 Flash cartridge, one USB Flasher/Cartridge Reader interface. I understand this cartridge/flasher system to be based on an open source/noncommercial design, which makes it an ethical gray area to manufacture or sell such a product without taking that into account.
This exists in contrast to the EMS 32 carts and the EMS transferrer (which I believe to be out of production), as well as the EMS "GB USB 64M" carts. These have been commonly available, and have served as the most common dev cartridge in the scene since the BleepBloop fiasco made a lot of noise and went out of production. They aren't the same design, and are functionally a different product.
EDIT: Fixing my acronym folly (FMAF)
Last edited by Telerophon (Sep 23, 2012 4:34 am)
Smart card usually refers to ems carts. smart boy is how people have referred to smart boy cart/programmer. Usually if someone means smart boy, they specifically say that.
I am we'll aware of the scene, the terms it uses, where it has been, and what things are generally called. Specifically flash carts, which have always been a large interest of mine. I've even been messing with building my own for quite a while now. maizemods.blogspot.com
Also the transferrer is still available here
http://www.hkems.com/product/gb/gba-tr.htm
Edit: with a d
Last edited by 12ianma (Sep 23, 2012 9:32 am)
i'll have some soon (pre-owned)
I'd be into one of these too.
Well, I really meant the polemic ones. There was a lot of cry about the use of some creative commons thing from this chinese guys, but I dont feel like "stealing" if I buy them from someone from the scene. I dont know if I make sense, you guys know english is not my mother language.
Definetely looking after kitsch and apeshit on this. Thanks for the answers. Anyways, if someone got spares, this thread will include FTrade stuff next week so Im open for it.
Telerophon: MBC5. MMC is NES lingo.
Ian: EMS's unit is called GB Smart Card with a D. And I believe most people just call them EMS cartridges.
And about gold plated contacts. Gold plated contacts are not always a good idea. There's something called galvanic corrosion. If you have contact of two metals with different anodic index (basically how noble the metals are) the metals will form a battery cell in the presence of some degree of humidity.(*) This effect gets worse the more different the metals are. This will cause corrosion to attack the least noble of the metals.
So this is a problem which would affect a Gameboy where a cartridge is plugged in in the presence of humidity. It's arguably more difficult to remove corrosion from the cartridge slot than from the cartridge edge connector. For this reason, gold may actually be a bad choice, and a nickel plating or even just bare copper a better choice. This may be a theoretical problem with little impact in real life. But my point is that it's easy to assume that something that is GOLD PLATED must be better than something that isn't, when in fact it may not be the best engineering decision for a particular situation.
(*) Compare this to the experiment where you put two different coins on top of each other in your mouth and feel a tickle on your tongue from the voltage produced. I would generally not recommend this experiment for obvious hygienic reasons, though.
Last edited by nitro2k01 (Sep 23, 2012 4:08 am)
Acronyms, my only weakness! Nooooooo! 
Isn't "Gold Plating = Better" the entire business model of RadioShack and Monster Cables these days? 
It's cool that EMS still makes their transferrers, but I'm still under the impression that those aren't compatible with the Ziegler/Smartboy based designs, right?
Also, HK EMS's website is an abomination, and I can never tell what they are currently producing and selling or how. For instance, in catching up on this thread, I went through their site. I couldn't find the pages for their flash cartridges, even though all of their transferrer pages reference the cartridges they are compatible with.
I've always known that gold plating isn't necessarily better but now i have an argument to throw at douchebags who gloat about their gold plated headphone jacks. Thanks, nitro!
I've always known that gold plating isn't necessarily better but now i have an argument to throw at douchebags who gloat about their gold plated headphone jacks. Thanks, nitro!
Well, not so fast. The gold plating does after all protect plated surface from getting tarnished. When it comes to headphone jacks, the connector naturally rotates, which helps prevent corrosion simply by mechanically scraping it off. A GB cart will sit in the same spot when the cartridge is not removed, and even when it's removed and reinserted, the position is predictable. Sure, you can mechanically remove some of the corrosion by doing the in/out ten times routine with the cartridge, but it's more vulnerable than a headphone connector. On the other hand, chances are any number of other thing will fail before the jack gets corroded, so in the end I do agree it's probably a waste of a perfectly good microgram or something of gold.
My point being, regardless of if they're actually gold plated, it's counterproductive. There is a lot of other variables with building a solid product. The bleepbloop carts were soldered with lead free solder. The parts aren't RoHS anyway, so there's no real point to this. Lead free solder oxidizes fast, and it's very likely that the solder will cause the carts to stop functioning before the edge connector oxidizes until it is non-functioning. This was the case with my USB cart, and probably the reason Kitsch was stuck with so many non-functioning carts. A combination of that and 20 year old parts can cause a lot of bad solder joints.
I could elaborate more on the physical advantages of using a smartboy or an ASM cart. I could also go into the moral concerns with plugging bleepbloop products in every single thread that mentions my carts or smartboy carts, but I'd just be beating a dead horse.
i *think* the lead-free bit was also in response to exportation concerns to the EU (possibly elsewhere). its been so long ago now, that aspect came up in conversation but i don't know if it was the reasoning.
That's a bit of a grey area though because this isn't really _new_ equipment, where I think the distinction is made. The ICs already contain lead, and there will be trace amounts of leaded solder from using old chips anyway.
Last edited by Apeshit (Sep 23, 2012 6:04 pm)