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.
• In EverDrive mode:
  • The latter 16MB of the ROM is unavailable while reading, so avoid using that part in your interrupt handlers, or your code might crash.
  • For this same reason, avoid soft-resetting while flashcartio_is_reading.
• In EZ Flash mode:
  • ROM is unavailable while using the SD card, so ~1KB of static EWRAM will be taken by some functions.
  • When reading, by default (see Compile-time options below), interrupts will be briefly disabled (REG_IME = 0) to avoid problems.
  • 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!
    • When reading, your ROM wait states should be 3,2 or slower. 3,1 will certainly make it crash!

Install

The code for the EverDrive cartridge is publicly available, but it doesn't have any license, so it's not included here.

• By default, the library only works with the EZ Flash Omega cartridges.
• If you want EverDrive support:
  • Download https://krikzz.com/pub/support/everdrive-gba/development/gbaio.zip from krikzz's website.
  • Ensure it's the 05.09.16 version in main.c.
  • Put the files bios.c, bios.h, disk.c, disk.h in the lib/everdrivegbax5 directory.
  • In bios.c:
    • remove all (u8*) and (u8 *) casts used in lvalues (left side of assignments).
    • add | CFG_BIG_ROM to the first assignment of bi_init().
    • completely remove bi_reboot(...) (also its header in the bios.h file).
  • In disk.c:
    • add the line #pragma GCC diagnostic ignored "-Wimplicit-function-declaration" at the top.
  • Set FLASHCARTIO_ED_ENABLE in lib/sys.h to enable EverDrive support.

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++.

To compile the example with EverDrive support, change -DFLASHCARTIO_ED_ENABLE=0 to -DFLASHCARTIO_ED_ENABLE=1 in its Makefile.

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

Compile-time options

In lib/sys.h:

• FLASHCARTIO_USE_DMA1: 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.
• FLASHCARTIO_ED_ENABLE: (EverDrive) Set to 1 to enable EverDrive support.
• FLASHCARTIO_ED_SAVE_TYPE: (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). The default is ED_SAVE_TYPE_SRM (SRAM). Unfortunately, this is required, since initializing the registers overwrites ROM configuration that is usually autodetected otherwise.
• FLASHCARTIO_EZFO_DISABLE_IRQ: (EZ Flash) If you are absolutely sure that your interrupt code doesn't access ROM and you won't be calling SoftReset in the middle of a read (see flashcartio_is_reading), 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.