Suggestion: GBA Slot

[Lillifer]

I know this has been suggested before and turned down; http://www.drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=201
but hear me out.

I've been playing Harvest Moon DS Cute (my favorite game ), but half of the bachelors are locked unless you insert the Harvest Moon FoMT game boy game into the slot.
I know that desmume has this feature, so I played the game first on desmume to unlock the extra features, then transferred the save file from my computer to my phone. Unfortunately, it didn't work. For some reason, Drastic wouldn't read the save file. There was no error message, it just wrote over it (from what I can tell).
I scoured the internet and found this post;
http://www.drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=53
which made me realize that Harvest Moon DS Cute must be one of the games that this method doesn't work with.
I then tried looking for cheat codes (as mentioned in the first post), but couldn't find any.

So unless anyone has any other methods I can try, my only choices are to play the game on my computer, or play without the extra content on my phone. I love Drastic (ironically, it runs faster than Desmume does on my computer) and I really like being able to pick up my phone and play whenever I want. I know it's a lot to ask, but I know I'm not the first to ask, and I think it would be very beneficial to the app.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

[Jay Haru]

I know this has been suggested before and turned down; http://www.drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=201
but hear me out.

I've been playing Harvest Moon DS Cute (my favorite game ), but half of the bachelors are locked unless you insert the Harvest Moon FoMT game boy game into the slot.
I know that desmume has this feature, so I played the game first on desmume to unlock the extra features, then transferred the save file from my computer to my phone. Unfortunately, it didn't work. For some reason, Drastic wouldn't read the save file. There was no error message, it just wrote over it (from what I can tell).
I scoured the internet and found this post;
http://www.drastic-ds.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=53
which made me realize that Harvest Moon DS Cute must be one of the games that this method doesn't work with.
I then tried looking for cheat codes (as mentioned in the first post), but couldn't find any.

So unless anyone has any other methods I can try, my only choices are to play the game on my computer, or play without the extra content on my phone. I love Drastic (ironically, it runs faster than Desmume does on my computer) and I really like being able to pick up my phone and play whenever I want. I know it's a lot to ask, but I know I'm not the first to ask, and I think it would be very beneficial to the app.

Thank you for taking the time to read this!

Unfortunately, as exophase explained, adding gba support is just counter-intuitive at this point. DraStic isnt perfect as it is and adding this capability would likely introduce more headaches.

[Exophase]

She's not asking for GBA support but GBA cart support.

The way I see it, adding support for the base GBA carts wouldn't be that bad, however you may need to have the ARM9 BIOS installed for it to work right on everything (I could explain why if anyone cares). But adding support for GBA saves is way more involved. If the games need to access the save on the cart then there's no point just doing the former. But if they unlock something just by having the game inserted it could be worth doing.

However, if say, Pokemon needs the game save then i'm not doing it even if some other game doesn't. Because I'll get too many people yelling at me about Pokemon not working and I'm not going down that path.

[JePP]

She's not asking for GBA support but GBA cart support.

The way I see it, adding support for the base GBA carts wouldn't be that bad, however you may need to have the ARM9 BIOS installed for it to work right on everything (I could explain why if anyone cares). But adding support for GBA saves is way more involved. If the games need to access the save on the cart then there's no point just doing the former. But if they unlock something just by having the game inserted it could be worth doing.

However, if say, Pokemon needs the game save then i'm not doing it even if some other game doesn't. Because I'll get too many people yelling at me about Pokemon not working and I'm not going down that path.

You could add it to the Pandora version to prove the glorious superiority of the almighty Pandora console (which has a community which is known not to yell)

[Jay Haru]

She's not asking for GBA support but GBA cart support.

The way I see it, adding support for the base GBA carts wouldn't be that bad, however you may need to have the ARM9 BIOS installed for it to work right on everything (I could explain why if anyone cares). But adding support for GBA saves is way more involved. If the games need to access the save on the cart then there's no point just doing the former. But if they unlock something just by having the game inserted it could be worth doing.

However, if say, Pokemon needs the game save then i'm not doing it even if some other game doesn't. Because I'll get too many people yelling at me about Pokemon not working and I'm not going down that path.

You could add it to the Pandora version to prove the glorious superiority of the almighty Pandora console (which has a community which is known not to yell)

so you are comparing a dedicated hobbyist community vs the thousand (r****s) strong android base. thats fair /s

[JePP]

It was just a poorly disguised attempt to lobby for more Pandora love, and not meant very seriously really

[Lillifer]

She's not asking for GBA support but GBA cart support.

The way I see it, adding support for the base GBA carts wouldn't be that bad, however you may need to have the ARM9 BIOS installed for it to work right on everything (I could explain why if anyone cares). But adding support for GBA saves is way more involved. If the games need to access the save on the cart then there's no point just doing the former. But if they unlock something just by having the game inserted it could be worth doing.

However, if say, Pokemon needs the game save then i'm not doing it even if some other game doesn't. Because I'll get too many people yelling at me about Pokemon not working and I'm not going down that path.

Unfortunately, some of the Pokemon games require the game saves for this feature to be of any use. I can see what you mean about people complaining if you made a GBA slot feature without the save files. I can't think of any other games that only require you to plug in the game card (granted my knowledge of games is limited to what I've played, which isn't a whole lot), so it wouldn't be worth it to add for just a few games.

Thank you to those who replied, I appreciate it! I'll probably go post something in the help section to see if I can't fix my issue with transferring save files.

[Exophase]

Here's a list, I don't know if it's 100% complete or not:

http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ ... nnectivity

It looks like most of these outside of Pokemon are simple unlock-if-present features. All of the GBA Pokemon games use 64KB flash so I'd cover a fair amount of ground just supporting that one save type. I can pull the code from gpSP as a base, but it'd probably have to be changed a lot, and there's a fair amount of glue code that'd have to be added in other places.

[beansta]

Here's a list, I don't know if it's 100% complete or not:

http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ ... nnectivity

It looks like most of these outside of Pokemon are simple unlock-if-present features. All of the GBA Pokemon games use 64KB flash so I'd cover a fair amount of ground just supporting that one save type. I can pull the code from gpSP as a base, but it'd probably have to be changed a lot, and there's a fair amount of glue code that'd have to be added in other places.

I thought pokemon firered/leafgreen used 128KB flash. Might be wrong though.

[Leaf]

Here's a list, I don't know if it's 100% complete or not:

http://nintendo.wikia.com/wiki/List_of_ ... nnectivity

It looks like most of these outside of Pokemon are simple unlock-if-present features. All of the GBA Pokemon games use 64KB flash so I'd cover a fair amount of ground just supporting that one save type. I can pull the code from gpSP as a base, but it'd probably have to be changed a lot, and there's a fair amount of glue code that'd have to be added in other places.

I thought pokemon firered/leafgreen used 128KB flash. Might be wrong though.

Only Emerald really needs 128KB. It actually can be played with 64KB until you get the Frontier Pass (after the League is beaten for the first time). You can still save, but if you go through the League again, upon saving on the Hall of Fame the save won't fit and will destroy itself.