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gba-flashcartio

A Game Boy Advance (GBA) C library to access the SD card of the following flashcarts:

• EverDrive GBA X5 / Mini
• EZ Flash Omega / OmegaDE

The flashcart type is autodetected and FAT partitions are supported via ELM-ChaN's FatFs library.

• Only read operations are implemented in FatFs.
• It reads using either DMA3 or DMA1.
• While reading, flashcarts make part of the ROM inaccessible during the operation (EverDrive disables the last 16 MB, and EZ Flash disables all ROM space). To prevent issues, by default, interrupts are briefly disabled (REG_IME = 0).
• EverDrive notes:
  • Since the last 16 MB of ROM are unavailable while using the SD card, make sure your linker script places these functions in the first 16 MB of ROM or in RAM.
• EZ Flash notes:
  • Since ROM is unavailable while using the SD card, ~1 KB of static EWRAM will be taken by some functions.
  • The EZ Flash Definitive Edition works great out of the box, but in the original one:
    • There's an autosave feature that copies the save file to the microSD card. It's triggered every time you write to SRAM, and it takes ~10 seconds to complete. This can cause conflicts if it tries to write the microSD card while you are reading from it. After writing to SRAM, let some time pass before you read the microSD card, or it will crash!
    • Your ROM wait states should be 3,2 or slower. 3,1 will certainly make it crash!

Usage

Refer to the example to see how it works. It is written in C++ for demonstration purposes, but gba-flashcartio is a C library, fully compatible with both C and C++.

An already compiled .gba ROM is available in the Releases section.

Compile-time options

In lib/sys.h:

• FLASHCARTIO_USE_DMA1 (default=0): Set to 1 to use DMA1 instead of DMA3. You'll need this if you also use DMA for audio, as DMA1/DMA2 have higher priority and will corrupt the SD reads. With this option, you can use DMA2 for audio and DMA1 for the SD card.
• FLASHCARTIO_ED_ENABLE (default=1): (EverDrive) Set to 0 to disable EverDrive support.
• FLASHCARTIO_ED_SAVE_TYPE (default=ED_SAVE_TYPE_SRM): (EverDrive) Set your game's save type manually here (one of ED_SAVE_TYPE_EEP, ED_SAVE_TYPE_SRM, ED_SAVE_TYPE_FLA64, ED_SAVE_TYPE_FLA128). Unfortunately, this is required, since initializing the registers overwrites ROM configuration that is usually autodetected otherwise.
• FLASHCARTIO_ED_DISABLE_IRQ (default=1): (EverDrive) If you are absolutely sure that your interrupt code doesn't access the last 16 MB of ROM and you won't be calling SoftReset in the middle of a read (when flashcartio_is_reading is true), you can avoid disabling interrupts by setting this option to 0.
• FLASHCARTIO_EZFO_ENABLE (default=1): (EZ Flash) Set to 0 to disable EZ Flash support.
• FLASHCARTIO_EZFO_DISABLE_IRQ (default=1): (EZ Flash) If you are absolutely sure that your interrupt code doesn't access ROM at all and you won't be calling SoftReset in the middle of a read (when flashcartio_is_reading is true), you can avoid disabling interrupts by setting this option to 0.

In lib/fatfs/ffconf.h:

• FF_FS_EXFAT: exFAT support can be disabled, as this can cause patent issues especially for commercial homebrew.

Thanks to

• asie for the FatFs library recommendation.
• Xilefian for the ezfo-disk_io development.
• TotalJustice for EZfo code improvements in this gist.
• krikzz for open sourcing gba-ed-pub.