game downloader

[nesuser2]

ok, i picked up what appeared to be junk today, but looked neat

its a game downloader for GBA/GBC and you hook it up to your computer and get games from their website. cheap generic games that dont spell fun. but you can import ROM files from any folder on your HD and i dont think it can hold much but it was really cheap, so if it held 3-4 games then i would be happy, so does anybody know of a way to import NES roms onto these, or know anything about them at all? i picked it up at software etc./gamestop......whatever you want to call it, it was only $4.99 so i'm not out much if i cant do anything with it, and if its really worth while i might go get another one to store more games on.......if anything can be done with it...

[davidbrit2]

I've got one of those. It's pretty damned neat. Basically, what you're looking at is a device that, with a little know how, will let you play Gameboy games up to 96 KB in size on a real system. That mostly limits you to titles from the first few years, but I've found some real gems to run on the thing.

The trick to getting commercial ROMs running on the device is hilariously simple. The official transfer program will tell you if you've got a commercial ROM and refuse to send it. All it does to check if the ROM is commercial is to look at the Nintendo logo bitmap which drops down when the Gameboy is powered on. So to get around that, all you have to do is find a hex editor, and change as little as one bit from the logo data. I can't remember the offset in the file, but it's pretty close to the beginning. After you've modified the image, it'll load just fine.

I'm not sure if anybody has made a custom utility to streamline this process, because I've never bothered looking. It's always a possibility.

Now, go play Afterburst. ;-)