dust hill resident
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Hello,

About 11 years ago I bought this gameboy flash cart when it was advertised on the front page of 8bitcollective.

I want to use it again but the software utility for flashing ROMs onto it is Windows only, and doesn't seem to work via Wine.

The hardware presents itself as a USB-serial interface so it should be straightforward to write a new tool for driving it, but I need to know the protocol. Right now I have no info on this at all.

Can anyone help?

Photo:
Mirror link:
Screenshot of the windows software:
Contents of the CD-R that was sent to me along with the flash cart when I bought it: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/ … 546/ucp.7z

catskull
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NUMBSKULL

That is a "bleepbloop usb" cartridge. What OS are you using? You can compile the flasher for mac or linux, but on mac you have to do some funkiness to get macos to not mount the serial interface with it's default driver.

dust hill resident
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I'm using Linux. Where can I find the flasher source?

catskull
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NUMBSKULL

This is the source I've compiled on Mac, not sure exactly on Linux but it says it works: https://github.com/cubicstyle/gbcartfla … .1_libftdi

dust hill resident
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It looks like it will be trouble getting this to build. I'm going to look through the code to see if I can make a simple non-gui commandline tool based on this

catskull
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NUMBSKULL

Worth pointing out that these cartridges should work fine with any other flasher you can buy right now. Also I just noticed the battery is missing so saving won't work!

Would you be interested in trading? I'm mostly just interested in documenting old/obsolete hardware. I could trade for an EZ Flash Jr. which is SD based, or something else? Either way, no big deal.

dust hill resident
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Thank you, I was tempted but I think for now I'll keep this flash cart, from the research I've done apparently EZ flash junior doesn't work reliably on GB Boy Colour (bootleg/clone console) and I'd really like to use the GB Boy I just got hold of.

I'll have a go at getting this flasher to work, and if I fail (seems likely at this point) I'll come back and ask if you still want to trade.

dust hill resident
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Yeah I don't think I'm going to get anywhere with this, the code is not very clear about what it's doing. The furthest I've gotten is that I've worked out the device is meant to send/receive 72 byte 'packets', where the first few bytes are info describing the contents and the last two bytes are CRC16 checksum of the first 70 bytes, apart from that I have no idea.

After studying the code for a while I tried to manually crafted the packet that it's meant when you click on the 'show cart info' button, but it didn't work, the device just sends back a single byte 0xFC in response, which is the same behaviour as if I send 72 random bytes.

I'll contact you about trading

catskull
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NUMBSKULL

I know the code uses libftdi to do some stuff beyond just usb-serial, so there's probably some black magic in there somewhere.