I love the past’s cartridge based gaming era. The Gameboy Colour and Gameboy Advance produced some of my favourite portable gaming experiences.
Today, for folks like me and homebrew enthusiasts on the whole, there are an ocean of options for physical and software based solutions to keep enjoying visibly pixelated games. From rewritable cartridges to replacement jewel cases and labels, refurbishment supplies are easy to come by.
And it’s based on all this that I undertook a bunch of projects:
- Take an old authentic Pokémon Silver cartridge and refurbish it, and then give it a proper case.
- Create physical copies of community-patched versions of Pokémon Emerald, and Yellow (and see what a modern take on past beloved games can be like).
- Create new physical versions, at a low cost, of games I’ve long since lost access to like Harvest Moon (More) Friends of Mineral Town for GBA.
Pokémon Silver Refurbishment
One of my friends’ children gave me one of their old games that had been abandoned and abused in a box in their basement. The plastic case of the cart was in good condition, but the label only had a small portion remaining with the rest of it ripped off. I popped it into my refurbished GBC (a future post) and saw that it was Pokémon Silver! Cool!
I accepted the cart, and got to work:
- Cleaned up and made the cart shine
- Soldered a new battery
- Got a new label
- Got a new jewel case (DS style)
The end result: silvery goodness!
Pokémon Yellow
A friend of mine told me about community patched versions of Yellow and Emerald and it intrigued me. I hadn’t played either much except for 10 mins here and there in an emulator, but I had played about 150 hours on my original physical copy of Leaf Green, and find Silver to be pretty great, so why not try others, and with modern quality of life improvements?
So I undertook the challenge of creating a physical gaming experience for both.
First I had to get RW carts in GBC and GBA formats. I sourced those from China. But I also needed a means of writing to the carts.
Last year I got myself an Epilogue GB Operator so I could make backups of all my GB/GBC/GBA cartridges and their save files. This device has the ability to write as well, but I didn’t know it at the time; not until recently. Hold that thought.
Meanwhile, a friend of mine had told me about the community patched versions of Emerald and Yellow and told me how he was going to give the gift of a replacement cartridge to a child in his family, and that he was going to use the Funny Playing BurnMaster to do it. I didn’t know my Epilogue could write, and I wanted to have a physical way of playing Poké Yellow, so I jumped at the suggestion to try the BurnMaster for myself.
Except, it didn’t go so smoothly.
First mistake: assembling the device wrong. I made so many mistakes, with the buttons, with the battery, with the screw length selections, all of it. I’m not good with hardware, let it be known.
Second mistake: trying to use a 128GB SD card and formatting it as FAT32. That corrupted data fast and the Burnmaster couldn’t work with it. I couldn’t even tell at first and had failure after failure on data reads from the SD card until I wrote more to it, and then the display started showing scrambled characters, and then I knew I had messed up. I didn’t have any smaller SD cards, so I had to obtain some and try again.
But even after all that, the Burnmaster wouldn’t write the rom for Pokémon Yellow Legacy (patched). It failed and failed.
And that’s when I wondered if my Epilogue could write as well as read, and I fired it up. Yup, right there, in the menus, and I never noticed. So I used that device instead and it worked!
New Harvest Moon Mineral Town, and Emerald
Harvest Moon More Friends of Mineral Town is one of my all-time favourite games across gaming history, next to Galaga, Ms. Pac-Man, Silent Hill, Pinball Fantasies (Amiga) and The Settlers. Playing this game is instant happiness–if I’m deep into a replay or starting up a new game. The cuteness and feel-goodness is eternal.
I used to own a new CIB copy of HM:MFoMT but sold it during a period of unemployment, which I’ve regretted since. It was important I get its joy back into my life again, and in a phyisical way.
I found some batterlyless FRAM based GBA RW carts online and got one for Harvest Moon. I also sourced a replacement cardboard box, and a label. I still had my original manual though.
As for Emerald, I’m having trouble getting it to work. I can burn it to the FRAM cart, but the saving doesn’t work. I think it’s because FRAMs don’t have clocks or batteries, and Emerald expects a clock+SRAM setup. These are new terms to me and I didn’t get the requirements aligned right. I’ll keep trying. I’ll have to stick for emulation for the Emerald Legacy experience for the time being.
(A couple weeks later…)
While working on the Harvest Moon project, I received a replacement box and insert, and was surprised to find another copy of the game inside! I had already started a replay on my self-written copy so I’ve just stored the replacement box and cartridge as a fun keepsake and will keep going with my own.
