Hello,
I’m very new to this site and am a novice with technology in general. (lol) Recently, I found my old DS that I had when I was a kid and dusted off FE8. Playing it again was so nostalgic. I proceeded to play fe7 and fe6 but still wanted more. I found rom hacks and dove into them. I have now played R2R, souls of the forest, the last promise, requiem, and justice and pride. It embarrassingly took me a while to figure out how to patch the games and play on an emulator. I obviously enjoyed the hacks, but it just isn’t the same. I started doing research on how I could convert these hacks into physical cartridges so I could still play them while spending time with my wife and child. I thought that because I had figured out how to patch these hacks, it would be a quick transfer of them to the cartridges. I ended up buying an epilogue gb operator and some generic 32mb cartridges to rewrite. When I did, the games were not saving or were freezing. I am clueless on how to code anything but did some digging and found out that FE game run on FRAM. I’m now stuck trying to figure out if I need to bite the bullet and buy 35$ cartridges and give it a shot or to just give up trying to convert them. I said all of this to ask:
Should I try with a better cartridge?
Is it even possible to convert fe rom hacks to physical cartridges?
Thanks in advance for any tips or tricks, and I apologize for the personal FE life history post.
If I understand you correctly, you would like to play them on DS? Why don’t you just buy a GBA flashcard? With EZ Flash, just copy the patched roms to a micro SD and insert it into the former, and you can put the cartridge on DS Fat/DS Lite/GBA/GBA SP. Or a cheap Supercard micro SD: in this case you would have to modify the patched roms with the client software on PC before putting them on the cartridge. As for me, I use just the latter on DS Lite, and all the F.E.hacks work great, without saving issues.
I use the EverDrive GBA mini by Krikzz. It’s somewhat pricey as far as flashcarts go (currently listed at $104 USD, which is about what I paid for mine in 2020) but it handles all GBA save types perfectly and doesn’t require patching the rom for compatibility. It loads and saves via microSD so you can have multiple games on it. I really can’t recommend it enough if it’s in your price range.
What sets the EverDrive apart for me is that it has fast enough SRAM transfer that GBAFE’s native auto-suspend feature works fine; older EZFlash or cheap flashcarts can brick the save if the console is powered off too soon. From what I’ve heard of reprogrammable carts, those also struggle with saving, especially for hacks that modify the save routines (Vision Quest did this to expand the playable cast count, and it’s known to have issues on repro carts, but it runs fine on my EverDrive). I can also confirm that Sacred Echoes (another save-modified hack) runs perfectly on EverDrive, as I used it to do my hardware testing during development.
Thanks for feedback. Looked at doing flachcart but was worried it still wouldn’t work and didn’t want to waste money. Do you ever run out of storage on it?
Supercard micro-SD works only with SD cards of up to 2 GB, but you can always use more than one. Again, and I repeat, I have tried all F.E. 7/8 complete hacks, and the saves (even about Vision Quest) work without any problems when placed each in its own folder. Regarding EZ Flash Omega, some GBAtemp users have reported that Vision Quest fails to save. If you are only interested in F.E.hacks then the former is sufficient; if you are interested in all GBA games, I recommend EZ Flash Omega.
This is my opinion, whether anyone likes it or not.
As many as your microSD card of choice can hold. A 32GB card (the smallest size most stores carry) can hold well over a thousand GBA games and sells for around $10 USD. Whichever flash cart you choose, they all have a microSD slot (though as Nikokaro mentioned, lower-end models like the Supercard can only use cards of less than 2GB; you can probably find a card of that size in an older-model mobile phone)
I have a GBxCart RW which sounds similar to your epilogue GB operator. It sounds like what you want is a bootleg 32mb cartridge with the correct save type - I’ve had success using a bootleg Pokemon Fire Red cartridge but that is 16mb. I’ve heard that bootleg Last Promise carts are 32mb and support saving so they should be compatible with other FE rom hacks however have not tried it myself.
For just playing games on hardware I also use the EverDrive GBA X5 mini (exactly the same as the GBA mini, they just removed the X5 at some point).
EverDrive will definitely work. They produce the best flashcarts in the game and have regular firmware updates. Anything better would require fabricating your own PCB to flash lol
32mb cartridges are a must for the hacks. Tried different ones off AliExpress, and all of the generic ones were too low quality to save any of the downloaded rom hacks.
