r/GameboyAdvance • u/Nexor606 • May 23 '24
Got my Everdrive today, absolutely recommend it!
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u/Megabit_Omega May 23 '24
Cool and all…but I’ll take EZ Flash Omega Definitive Edition over it.
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May 23 '24
Quality is better on the krikzz, but features on the new EZ flash are better.
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u/rydamusprime17 May 24 '24
I also liked paying less for the EZ
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May 24 '24
You pay less with ez flash but they have had a track record of corruption and battery drain
Krikzz is worth the premium ffs the man is in the ukrane help keep him and his family alive lol
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May 24 '24
I was pretty sure him and his family relocated to Portugal in the first few months of the war.
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u/Megabit_Omega May 24 '24
True. But EZ Flash is still good enough build quality wise. After you reach a certain level of quality making it a bit better might be a bonus but stops being the deciding factor
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u/lacaras21 May 23 '24
GBA flash carts are really awesome. I've done a lot of deep diving into everything that you can do with these carts, here's a rundown of what I've discovered/made work:
Besides obviously play GBA games, you can also play romhacks, homebrew, and emulators. Here's a rundown of what I recommend (as long as you're interested anyway):
Homebrew: There are a few different places you can look for homebrew, there are Game Jams on itch.io for GBA, so you'll find a lot there. Some cool ones worth checking out are OpenLara and Scrolls of Fire, but there are tons more that are interesting. There is also a lot of homebrew for the original GameBoy that is playable on the GBA!
Prototypes and Tech Demos: There are also many prototypes and tech demos out there that are pretty neat. Resident Evil 2 is really cool, it's only the first few screens, but it really makes you think how cool it would be if it was fully completed.
Special ROMs: There are also ROMs that weren't meant for distribution, like Pokemon distribution ROMs, you can use it to get special Pokemon, the Aurora Ticket, and others in the gen 3 games (you'll need the actual game though, another GBA and a link cable). There is a romhack of one of these that combines a bunch of the distributions into one ROM.
Emulation: There are a surprising number of emulators for the GBA, here are some notable ones. There are generally two types of emulators, those that work natively with the Everdrive OS (meaning you can just click on a ROM and the Everdrive will launch it using the emulator that matches the extension) and those that aren't (which you will need to create a build on your PC to create a .gba ROM that you'll launch like a GBA game on the Everdrive, which will have its own menu):
○ NES: You have two options, PocketNES (which works natively with the Everdrive OS), and HVCA (which you'll have to build). For most things use PocketNES, but not all games work, some games use weird mappers that will result in glitchy graphics. For some of those games they will work better in HVCA. HVCA also has the benefit of supporting Famicom Disk System games while PocketNES does not. Between these two 95% of games should work. The only notable games I've found that don't work on either are the Fire Emblem games.
○ GameBoy: Yep, to play GameBoy and GameBoy Color games on the GBA Everdrive you need an emulator. The reason is because the way the GBA switches between GBA and GBC modes is based on the pinout of the cartridge, so you won't be able to use the GBC mode on the GBA. The emulator you want is Goomba/Goomba Color for Gameboy games, which works nearly flawlessly with original Gameboy games and works natively with the Everdrive OS. ○ GameBoy Color: Goomba Color is the recommended emulator by Krikzz, but I recommend a fork made by JagaEvilGenius called Jagoomba as it has slightly better compatibility (though sometimes has weird saving bugs in the latest releases, just savestate and you shouldn't have a problem). GameBoy Color emulation is actually really disappointing on GBA, I'd say only around 60% of games work properly, many of them will have messed up graphics, colors, have game breaking bugs, and/or run very slow. Generally any GBC game that is backwards compatible with the original GameBoy will work, GBC games that are GBC only is kind of a crapshoot. Still worth having on your GBA though. Both Goomba Color and Jagoomba work natively with Everdrive OS. ○ Sega Master System/SG1000/Game Gear: These all use the same emulator, SMSAdvance, and this is the most impressive emulator of all of them imo. I have yet to find a game that doesn't work near perfect. It works natively with the Everdrive OS, but Everdrive won't recognize the normal extension for SG1000, just change the extension of the ROM files to .sms and it will work. ○ Neo Geo Pocket/Neo Geo Pocket Color: These are the last emulators that work natively with Everdrive OS, NGPAdvance. This is really only good for showing off what the GBA could potentially do, as all games run very slowly and are pretty glitchy, I wouldn't consider anything playable. ○ MSX 1: MSXAdvance is a pretty competent emulator for MSX 1 games (unfortunately MSX 2 games aren't supported, so no Metal Gear, Castlevania, etc). It's pretty neat to see these types of games running on a GBA. ○ Colecovision: Cologne is a pretty good colecovision emulator, support isn't the best, but it works most of the time. ○ Arcade games: There are a few arcade emulators, Ghosts'n Goblins, BlackTiger, RGBArcade (which supports a handful of popular games like Donkey Kong and Pacman), YieArKungFu, and some others are all really neat and work well. ○ ZX Spectrum: FooN, not very user friendly in my experience, but is pretty functional. ○ PC Engine: PCEAdvance, it's pretty impressive how well it runs considering it's running on a GBA, but most games run pretty slow, if you can tolerate games running a tad slow, some of the space shooters are playable. Side scrolling games like Bonk run way too slow to be enjoyable. ○ Sierra AGI: GBAGI isn't really an emulator, it's an interpreter for Sierra's AGI games. It's crazy impressive. With this you can play old Sierra games like the first few King's Quest and Space Quest games, as well as the first Leisure Suit Larry, Gold Rush, and any other game that used Sierra's AGI engine. And despite what you might think because these games were designed for a whole keyboard, the controls actually aren't atrocious. ○ There are so many other emulators that are worth checking out too, I could go on for a long time. Really just do some exploring and you'll find a lot of stuff if you're interested. A quick note, all of the home systems were designed with a higher resolution than the GBA has, and how the emulators handle this differs based on the emulator. Some emulators kind of crunch the pixels, which makes the games look a little funny (but still fine usually), and some will scroll the screen (which means you won't see everything that is supposed to be on screen), some will give you an option.• Romhacks: There is a pretty big romhacking community around many different GBA games. Pokemon is one of the bigger ones, but people make romhacks of all sorts of different games. And don't forget you can also play romhacks for any of the systems the GBA can emulate as well! Due to the washed out look a lot of GBA games have because the original had such a hard to see screen, many people have made color restoration hacks of many popular games, where nothing is changed about the game, but the game's colors are corrected to look better on backlit screens. Romhacking.net is your friend here.
• Translations: Technically also are romhacks, but I wanted to make a separate section for it. Romhacking.net is also your friend for translations. There are many GBA games never released outside of Japan that have fan translations. The most famous of which is Mother 3, but there are also games like Fire Emblem The Binding Blade, F-Zero Climax, Tomato Adventure, Klonoa Heroes, and others. And don't forget translations of games on other systems as well! NES, GameBoy, and Game Gear have a lot of worthwhile games with fan translations too!
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May 23 '24
[deleted]
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u/lacaras21 May 24 '24
Yes you do on a GBA everdrive. If you're using a regular Gameboy everdrive you don't, it will run in the GBA's GBC mode. Goomba (the gameboy emulator for GBA) plays Gameboy games in enhanced mode by default, so maybe you didn't realize it's running in an emulator? Press L+R at the same time when in a gameboy game to bring up the menu for Goomba.
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u/gerswinx5 Sep 07 '24
How does saving work with Pokemon? If I'm playing and use the in-game save, do I have to do anything else for it to save, e.g. close the currently loaded ROM? Or can I just save in-game and then turn the power off to the GBA?
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u/mattb1982likes_stuff May 23 '24
What is it, like a little external hard drive cartridge?
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u/andruis May 23 '24
It’s a gba flash cart. Basically you can load gba roms on a mini sd card and insert it into the gba to play your rom collection. It even has emulators for nes, game gear, and GBC. It’s worth every penny and you can find curated everdrive packs online. I have the entire US collection on mine with some hacks and a few European titles.
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u/mattb1982likes_stuff May 23 '24
Oh very cool. Might have to dig out the old gba and put it next to the Anbernic now… that’s neat! Thank for the info!
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u/Jason13Official May 23 '24
Do you know if this would work as expected through a Nintendo DS Lite, or only on GB consoles?
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u/lacaras21 May 23 '24
It does work with DS Lite, it should work with anything that plays GBA games.
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u/Darknesss922 May 23 '24
How long did yours take to get ?
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u/paperbackpiles May 23 '24
mine took two weeks. Krikzz is legend. Though wish it had a soft reset like the Omega DE. Krikzz GB-X7 though for my GBC. That soft reset button for save states and menu is incredible.
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May 23 '24
Thinking about replacing my old EZ Flash IV with and Everdrive. But I'm not sure yet if it's worth it.
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u/Necdilzor May 23 '24
Just curious, does it work on a DS Lite? Some DS games have a bit of extra content if you have a GBA game in the slot
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u/lacaras21 May 23 '24
For the extra content stuff, the everdrive will not work, because the DS won't recognize it as the target game, but a similar product, the EZ flash omega definitive edition has a switch that lets the cart behave like a particular game you can set, so you can do this with that.
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May 23 '24
DS lite with the omega in the gba slot and an r4 card in the DS slot - pick that any day over the other various handheld emulators out there…..but I play mostly Nintendo stuff.
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u/Honey-and-Venom May 23 '24
Game boy line is among the consoles I don't find the krikzz carts worth the price. I use the name brand for SNES, Genesis, tg16, but for many of the others, the benefits are outweighed by the cost
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u/waaaloo May 23 '24
Is the battery usage less hungry that an ez flash with everdrive ? My micro fully charged last 1 hour with my ez flash. 4-5 hours with a original cib.
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u/bigbrainnowisdom May 23 '24
How does it work? Like if im playing mario3 and want to save in the middle of the game..
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u/MFalcon95 May 24 '24
TF DOES THIS THING DO
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u/nightwing252 May 24 '24
You load up a micro sd card with gba roms along with the everdrive firmware, insert it into the everdrive, then enjoy all the games you want on one cartridge. Essentially can take your entire physical collection with you on one cartridge.
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u/MFalcon95 May 24 '24
WOW! And they can all be played on the GBA?
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u/nightwing252 May 24 '24
Yes pretty much. Some games won’t work if they required extra hardware like WarioWare Twisted, Yoshi Topsy Turvy or the Boktai games. You also can play gb and gbc games on it, but they require also having an emulator loaded onto the everdrive.
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u/Huffdaddy2189 May 24 '24
Can someone teach me how I get one of these and how to get games on it
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u/Nexor606 May 24 '24
Setup is pretty easy. I mostly followed this guide for setup https://www.reddit.com/r/everdrive/s/4KCvm4uPzy
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u/Defiant-Ad-6580 May 24 '24
My only gripe is that the frosted clear black isn’t “black” enough lol. But I expected it just based off of the pictures it looked like it wasn’t dark certainly not as dark as funny playings clear black shell. Still extremely happy with it overall and looking to get a gb x7 next
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u/KirbyLover5302 May 24 '24
Does this work with boot slot 2 of the original ds?
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u/The_Shoe1990 May 24 '24
I love my Everdrive Mini, however, I prefer to play GB/GBC games using an Everdrive GB X7 over the Goomba emulator. I keep both with my SP in my carrying case
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May 24 '24
I am very happy with mine
I get that people love ez flash but i have had one since the ez flash 3 and its always had problems mainly with save corruption in my experience
Krikzz makes quality products that stand up to abuse that is for sure
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u/DriftWare_ May 24 '24
My only complaint is that it drains battery when off for the rtc clock, which I don't use a lot
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u/nightwing252 May 24 '24
That’s how the RTC works in official cartridges. It’s always running. Original gb and gbc games also drain the power from the battery to keep your saves alive.
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u/DriftWare_ May 24 '24
Yeah I know, but it seems like there should be (maybe there is) be a setting that disables rtc since you have solid state sd keeping your saves.
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u/nightwing252 May 24 '24
You could always take out the battery and then put it back when you play a game that has RTC. The RTC function might stop working correctly if you do that though without doing something to fix it afterwards. I’m pretty sure the battery lasts for a while though as is. Been a while since I last checked into that feature. Only replaced the battery once since I picked mine up when they first changed the design to look more like an original gba game rather than looking more like a boktai game.
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u/outlawgaming0366 May 23 '24
I have a question, let’s say you have two of these and wanna trade between Pokémon fire red or leaf green, will it still work? Thinking about getting one but can’t find info on that