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| EZF-Advance II 256M Flash Card Set Reviews |
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 View Product Info |
GameBoy Advance - EZF-Advance II 256M Flash Card Set. Single USB to GBA link port cable operation, most portable fashion device for your package, GBA and GBA SP compatible. |
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| 01. |
gbadev.org |
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10/17/2003 |
Reviewer: www.gbadev.org
Conclusion: So what are my thoughts about the EZ-Flash USB kit? I couldn't be more happy with it! Finally something that will let me send stuff quickly without having to take the cartridge out of a linker and putting it in my GBA. I would indeed recommend this unit to anyone! This kit works with GBA SP. The EZ-Flash also has a realtime clock so we might see some nice demos/games that will make use of that soon! To start the clock all you have to do is press L+R+START and set the current time. The cart supports all save types as well so one could sure do lots of fun stuff.
First thing that came to mind was how small the box was. What the hell is in it? have they sent something else? To answer my questions all I had to do was open the box, which I did. Everything was there! We have the USB<>GBA cable, a small mini-cd with drivers and communication software and of course the actual flash card, which in this case is a 128mbit one (in a nice transparent red colour as well!).
After taking some pictures of it I didnt want to waste any more time so I quickly pulled out some other USB stuff that was connected (smart card readers, scanners etc), just to make some room =)
Now I just needed to get the drivers and send tools from the small cd. There is an installation.htm file on the cd with basic instructions that will have you up and running stuff in 2 minutes basicly. Drivers for 98/ME/2000/XP are avialable. I do not know if anything has been made for it to be used on linux...
I had no problems installing the drivers or getting my stuff to work but maybe it could be a good thing to include a small FAQ with the most common problems, just in case something isnt working. I dont know of many people having problems with the EZ-Flash though so perhaps a FAQ isnt needed? ;) Please note that a FAQ etc are available on the EZ Flash website. I am just pointing out that this could be added to the cd as well. At time of writing only one question is in the FAQ though as that is "When will the EZF-Advance be available? And where can I get it?" so that might be why its not included yet ;)
When you have completed the instructions on the cd, all you have to do is start the send client, turn on the gba and press start+select until you hear that multiboot chime. A gray background with the text "EZF Advance OS" will greet you, and the unit is now ready to be used!
Sending stuff to the card is easy and fast. The client is simple and the transfer speed is very good. I do not have any exact transfer rate but it I got around 82kb/s (195kb/s according to the manufacturer). This is less than half the speed the manufacturer says so there might be something wrong with my setup.
One 'problem' (feature?) I noticed was that even if you only sent one rom to the card, it would not start automaticaly but instead you would be presented with the EZF menu (Loader) which can be quite annoying, especially if you only need to send one rom image several times when testing stuff. Im sure it will be easy to get around this in the future though. When sending several images it is of course a good thing to have a menu ;) It works but they should improve on it a bit because the 'select arrow' can be hard to control (not fixed in 0.94beta2).
Another nice feature is fact that you can very easily send multiboot images with the send software. This is called "No Cart". Please note though that when you dont have a cart in your GBA and you want to send a multiboot image, I think you have to hold the start+select buttons a bit longer. Took me 2-3 tries before I got this actually :) Anyway, you simply select a multiboot image and it will start without any loading time (about 2 seconds for a full 256kb file). Unless you have moded your GBA with a reset button, you will need to turn it off and then on again (again hold start+select...) to be able to send another image.
Thanks to Reviewer: www.gbadev.org
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