GBA SP and the ecard reader

[Mr-E_MaN]

I was looking into buying the ecard reader for my GBA SP. One thing that is kinda bothering me is that I do not want to buy the original one and a new version made for the SP to come out a couple of weeks later. I know there is a "Ecard reader +" but I believe it is jap only, is it coming to north america?

Another thing that is bothering me is the link port on the ecard reader. I know that it is not necessary to play the ecards, but is the link port on the ecard reader just because the link port would be covered on the original GBA, or is it needed if you want to link ecard readers together. (I don't know why I would need to link them yet, but it says you can on the ecard readers website.

The ecard reader website does not talk about the SP, and I can't find any good websites that talk about the GBA SP and the ecard reader.

And one other question:
I have seen on a couple of websites where people say that the ecard only unlocks the games in the ecard reader, and that there will never be a lot of ecards coming out. (because they would need to be in the ecard to begin with) Is this true? Is all of the ecards that are going to me made already in the ecard reader?

I edited the questions to make them a little more clearer for anyone that might read this later on.

[SoulBlazer]

I'm not sure I understand all of your questions, but I have both a SP and a E-reader.

The E-reader DOES work in the SP -- just slide it into the cart port on the bottom, scan the cards, and then you can remove it.

There's no games stored in the E-reader -- all the games are on the cards, and E-reader has enough memory for one card.

You can link the E-reader to the GC while it's plugged into the SP if you want.

[Achika]

E-Reader / SP Face / SP Screen / Link Cable

The link port that is on the E Reader is basically a pass through port for the regular GBA. On the SP, the link cables will go on the back.

If I understand correctly, the E Reader + holds 3 games instead of the regular E Reader's 1. There are 13 games out for the E Reader right now, plus Manhole, the Pokemon-E sets, Animal Crossing, Air Hockey-E (special from retailers), plus I just saw an ad for more Game & Watch E cards to be coming out (the LCD ones, not the Golf, Donkey Kong, etc.) that looks like they will come in random packs (like Animal Crossing and Pokemon-E)

[Anonymous]

The definitive anotherfluke response:

I know there is a "Ecard reader +" but I believe it is jap only, is it coming to north america?

The eCard Reader + that was released in Japan is the american eReader. The original Japanese one didn't have the link cable pass through, and couldn't save any game data (in other words, once you scanned a game in then turned the GBA off the game would disappear and you'd have to rescan the cards). There are no plans to bring out an updated eReader at this time.

...is the link port on the ecard reader just because the link port would be covered on the original GBA, or is it needed if you want to link ecard readers together?

Achika is right, it is just a pass through, and on the GBA SP it doesn't actually plug in to anything, so no problems there.

I have seen on a couple of websites where people say that the ecard only unlocks the games in the ecard reader, and that there will never be a lot of ecards coming out. (because they would need to be in the eReader to begin with) Is this true? Is all of the ecards that are going to me made already in the ecard reader?

NOT True. The cards actually contain the game data on them. I believe someone worked it out at one point, but basically the cards hold like between 3 and 6 kb per swipe, although my numbers could be off. There is a new set of NES eCards coming out this fall, with more (and bigger) games on them. I guess they are kind of low priority, but they are still being supported, so it means they will keep coming out, but you have to keep an ear out for them since they won't be hyped like the big titles.

[SoulBlazer]

BIGGER games? Christ, I allready have to swipe five cards twice in order to play one NOW.....how many swipes would a game like Legend of Zelda or Super Mario need?

[Mr-E_MaN]

Thanks for your help!

[calthaer]

I can't seem to find the post where we figured out how much data were on those cards, but it went something like this...

Balloon Fight is a five-card NES game. It has nine strips that you need to scan (two on each card except for the last one). The game is 40kb as an NES ROM on my hard drive. This means that each data strip on an e-Reader card can contain a little over 4Kb of data. Each card can have about 8Kb of data. For argument's sake, let's say that each strip can contain 4.5Kb and a card 9Kb.

If that's truly the case, then the math is easy. Legend of Zelda is a 128Kb NES game. That means you have about 28.4 (or 29, let's say) strips to scan if each one holds 4.5Kb. Even if a strip holds 5Kb or so you still have 25-26 strips to scan. This turns out to be approximately 13 cards you'd need to get...not to mention the problem of saving your Zelda game - that is, you could save it in the e-Reader's memory, but if you scanned another e-Reader card set you'd lose the Zelda information.

Super Mario Bros., however, is 40Kb just like Balloon Fight. They could put that game on e-Reader cards and it should only take up five cards.

This is an imperfect way of calculating all of that because it's quite possible that, although Balloon Fight the NES ROM takes up 40Kb, the game itself isn't 40Kb large. It could have just been put on that size NES cartridge and it didn't take up all the space...which would mean that the e-Reader cards can hold less data than I'm estimating they can. Donkey Kong Jr., which is also a 5-card set, is only a 25Kb NES ROM - with 10 data strips (two on each card), that means that each card contains 2.5Kb data, meaning Zelda would take 51-52 stripes, making Legend of Zelda a 25- or 26-card e-Reader set! Zelda 2: The Adventures of Link would take up over 50 cards, as would the original Final Fantasy and a lot of other NES games like Mike Tyson's Punchout, Mega Man 2 or 3, SMB2, and a bunch of others. Wario's Woods or Mega Man 4, 5, or 6 would take up a whopping 100 cards as those games are 512Kb. There are some games like SMB3 that are in the middle and have a 384Kb ROM - maybe they'd "only" take up 75 cards or something.

But then again...who wants to make 100-200 scans to play an old NES game? Besides that, they're selling e-Reader cards for $.50 - $1.00 each in most venues (that's an average - if the pack costs $5.00 and there are five cards, then)...that means that a 200-card set would run you $100 at the very least. You could buy a used NES along with ten or more copies of the game at that rate.

[The Manimal]

100 scans? They should pay YOU to do all the work of scanning them.


I think the E-Reader is dumb for the following reasons. For that price ($40 or so?) and the cards....consdiering how much data can be stored on a GBA cart...couldn't they just do a multi-game cart and sell it for $30?

Don't know how much GBA carts can hold, but SNES had KI and it was 32 Megs... Depending on the games, you could store quite a few. I think the largest NES games were only 4 Megs.....so that's at least 8.

And no scanning

[Mr-E_MaN]

I ended up buying an ecard reader with excitebike, balloon fight, donkey kong jr., and pinball. When I got home and opened it up I found out that my factory sealed excitebike did not have 2 out of the 5 cards that was supposed to be there... wierd... so I brought that one back.

Boy those things get annoying. I wanted to try out every game and it took me like 10 min to scan every card and then test the game... They are fun though once they are scanned.

Hopefully they can get some better games, and maybe an easier way to scan the cards... perhaps attach 5 cards in a foldy thingy.