Hey, thanks for sharing this information. I myself have recently dipped into the bootleg cart/cart dumping/cart modding scene myself, and this is a really good overview of what’s out there in terms of Fire Emblem GBA.
The comments on the “mass-produced” carts largely align with my own experience. I bought several of these cartridges to research how to put my own romhack on a cartridge, and I’ve found a myriad of problems with these bootlegs: cheap labels that are already peeling by the time they arrive, cheap casings that don’t snap together quite right, numerous problems with saving, and even problems with the wrong version of a game being on the cart.
Even putting aside the moral and legal issues (of which there are many) of these mass-produced bootlegs, I can’t recommend them to someone looking to experience these games on real hardware as the quality of these reproductions is a major crapshoot. Some are just fine, some play fine but have cosmetic issues, and some have major playability issues.
I’ll add that a lot of these bootlegs are hacked to save the game in a different way than an authentic FE cart does, and as a consequence the autosave feature doesn’t function with suspend now functioning more as a static bookmark. These bootlegs actually write your save to a portion of the ROM itself as opposed to using SRAM/FRAM saving, and this is done to save some money on components.
I personally don’t have any experience with the more artisan/custom flavor of cart reproductions because I went the route of trying to make my own carts. I personally use this tool to dump and re-flash cartridges/saves, and it has worked well for me.
The bigger issue in my quest to make my own FE romhack cartridges has been trying to source cartridges to re-flash, and contending with saving issues. Re-flashing the mass-produced bootlegs is the cheapest option, but you then also need to alter the game to save in the way that these cartridges are set up to do so. I was able to reverse-engineer the code used in the bootleg games themselves (with separate applications for FE7 and FE8 base ROMs), and applying this code works for some romhacks.
For example, I was able to alter the code for Order of the Crimson Arm and Dark Lord and the Maiden of Light, and then re-flash these games onto bootleg cartridges to create physical carts for these romhacks that seem to work well. However, applying the same code to, say, The Road to Ruin doesn’t seem to work, as the game has numerous glitches and crashes, and I’m still trying to figure out why, as RtR doesn’t alter saving as far as I know.
Unfortunately, romhacks that alter the save routine in some way (such as using the common ExModularSave hack for FE8 projects) won’t work with my reverse-engineered code which assumes vanilla save functionality. This means I’m currently at a loss for a way to effectively re-flash bootleg carts with many modern romhacks, as they won’t save properly. I’m really interested to hear about your experience with the Vision Quest cartridge, as VQ uses ExModularSave.
One potential option for these types of games is to use higher-quality re-writable carts that don’t require alterations to the save function, such as this cartridge. These higher-quality carts seem to be better made as a whole, and come without games flashed on them, circumventing many of the moral and legal issues presented by the bootlegs. However, these carts are much more expensive, and also are commonly out of stock due to issues sourcing the parts; in fact, I’ve been waiting months for the listed one to be in stock, and will be purchasing some myself to test them out!
All in all, I rambled quite a bit here, but maybe this is interesting or informative for those interested in getting into the custom cartridge scene. It is a bit of a strange world somewhat fraught with fraud and dubious quality, but it’s also really cool to see some of these custom projects with their own dedicated cartridges.