I actually own a Game Jack that I got back in the day when the Game Boy was still popular, so I can probably answer a few questions: - This copier was made by UFO and sold mostly in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. I don't know how rare the Japanese varient is, but I think the Chinese version is more common(?). I own several UFO products. - I can see your missing the software CD which is used for connecting your Game Jack via parallel port to your PC. You would need a streight-through parallel cable to use it. - The game cards go up to 64Mbits. I know, because I own several 64Mbit cards with built in rumble feature. - Not only can you copy larger games with a bigger card, but you can also use a ROM header/BIOS to load multiple games on a single card and access them via a menu system. You would need to connect the base unit to your PC in order to create a multi-game ROM image. - This isn't the only system that can duplicate game cartridges without a PC! I also own a Touch Boy copier from Hachi Shi Co, and it looks like a Game Genie, except the extra cartridge slot on the back is used for duplicating games directly with your Game Boy system. It has 32Mbits internally and can store a maximum of 4 games at a single time. So with this card, you don't even need a docking station.
There was a device called Mega Memory which was inserted between your Gameboy and cartridge which could backup saves and restore them later. Great for avoiding save game loss. I bought mine from "Game" in the UK in around 1998, so they must have been commonly available at some point, but I've never seen them mentioned by anyone else. I bought another one recently, it was so useful! The saves are stored internally and there's no way to export them to PC, unfortunately.
I might need to do this as I still have my original 1998 Red save from when I was a kid (never overwrote it once and shared the file with my mother) and am really sentimentally attached to it.
The ones he tested are really small. The Link one is a 2MB one - that was kinda impressive, but also not too much of a surprise. Still nice, not gonna lie.
A shame that finding a decent version of this is practically impossible here in the US. I'm sure there are plenty of cheap chinese knockoffs but I wonder if there are any good ones.
Official Blank GB cartridges were sold in Japan... but to buy new games to put on. Similar to the famicom disk system. They did the same thing with SNES too
You do not have to imagine, they did back in the day but they where off brand and expensive~ and we were all little apple heads so we didn't know any better~
I had one of these and used it for homebrew development almost 20 years ago! I remember making a clone of Space Invaders called "Space Evaders". The port is actually a parallel port.
@@AtanoKSi I know, that would have been fun. I haven't had a computer with a parallel port in a long time, and I didn't have the foresight to predict UA-cam.
I believe it's megabits, not megabytes. 16 Megabytes would have been an absolutely massive amount of flash storage for the early-mid 90s. Even 4 megabytes was quite a lot of flash storage. I think the largest gameboy ROM sizes were around 8 megabits, which is one megabyte.
Yes. The one he has is a 4 Megabits cart, which holds games with size up to 512 KBytes. The biggest commercially available Game Boy game was that japanese train simulator, with 64 Megabits or 8 Megabytes.
I have to say, you have reignited the flame inside of me to collect gameboys, accessories or even other old retro items. I started wayyyyyy before I found the channel, and as someone who was born just before the GBAs release.. I missed out on a lot of old tech. I started collecting bits n bobs when I was given my uncles Gameboy Pocket (which strangely enough, we found the battery cover in a completely different house. I eventually stopped trying to collect games and consoles after finding out how much I was spending per product... Amazon really wasn't the smartest of options. When I first found your channel I got into the mood to retry collecting consoles, games etc. After advertising Sendico (about a million times ;P) I had to check it out for myself and its wonderful. I've just ordered 6 or 7 products about an hour ago and I'm already hyped for it. Thanks for you content and everything you have done! Keep it up! (Apologies for the really long comment :D)
This is interesting, I actually own one of these that I got in a Japanese game lot years ago and never knew what it was for. I've tried to look up information and it was hard to find anything, so it's great to learn a bit more. I have the version with the 4MB card
These were advertised in the states in I believe it was EGM, but it was never released. Although another accessory that was advertised was released for a brief moment...Bleem!...which I still actually own my PC copy & the 4 they made for Dreamcast
I still have my PC copy of bleem! too (that I never actually used sadly) I could only ever find the MGS and Tekken 3 bleem! for Dreamcast. Though I also did pick up some PlayStation 2 to Dreamcast controller converters.
instead of using 10 like we should we're going to use 8 and be super confusing and then sometimes we're going to count to 16 and we're going to put letters in there and when it gets to 16 it rolls over to the next one WTF is up with computers
@@bland9876 Nothing can really be done about computers using x^2 based on the boolean working of electronics. I do agree about the bits vs bytes though and don't get me started on GB Vs GiB and so forth when talking about storage.
@@PSNGormond GB vs GiB would be alright if only manufacturers would stick to the damn standard and not mix the two up whenever they feel like it. So frustrating.
@@bland9876 I feel you there, but I promise it all actually starts to make sense if you study Computer Science. I was about a year into my degree before it finally clicked why binary, octal, and hexadecimal are so useful.
The GB camera might "work" with a big enough cartridge. From the point of view of the GB, the cartridge is always just storage. Special cartridge will expose dynamic data at specific addresses. It is possible that the cartridge would show a static image of what the camera was seeing when copying the cartridge.
Gosh I love your channel Elliot! Such wonderful gaming stuff! I also love the banter you're developing! It's so good! You're becoming a younger Ashens it seems with the sarcasm and wit, and I mean that in the best possible way. All you need now is a brown sofa
I remember this thing. Even back when they were still selling it I wondered why anyone would buy it over the Bung GB Xchanger with Doctor GB Card flash cart... which is the system I bought. I still have it but I loaned the 64meg Doctor GB Card v2 to a friend and his dad smashed it with a hammer. D: Yeah, his parents were separated and he was leaving for the weekend to spend time with his father. I loaded it up with a bunch of games including Pokemon Crystal, which was still Japanese-only at the time. It blew his mind! He probably thought that weekend was his only chance to play Crystal so I'm guessing that his father couldn't tear him away from the Game Boy... so he smashed it. I recently found it in a pile of stuff and realized that it still works if you press down the flash ROM chip. I reflow this stuff all the time so expect a repair video soon. :) In the years since I got a Bung Multi Xchanger for the PSX and a Bung Doctor V64jr 512, which works with the Doctor GB Card as part of the "Multi Game Doctor³" (MGD³) series of backup hardware. It lets me use the PlayStation as a CD-ROM drive for the N64! I'm still not sure if I can load games from the GB Card to the V64jr through a PlayStation, but it has the connections to make that possible.
@@duffman18 That kind of abuse is probably why his parents split. This kid grew up to be my best friend but I still never met his father, who eventually had a stroke and is now in a care home. Even if the game was coming between them enough to anger him, I can't see that being appropriate. That smashed GBC was a Christmas present from his mom who had so little money I was surprised she could even afford it. I recall he had Smurfs and Pokemon Yellow when his father prematurely ended his childhood Game Boy collection. :(
@@Charky_Creations I know those bootlegs will work as flash carts with other programmers but not with the Bung GB Xchanger. :( Maybe someone could write special software for that but I don't think anyone has since it uses the obsolete parallel port. The main reason to get the Bung unit over the GameJack was because you could put multiple games on one cartridge and I don't think there is a menu program for that on the modern bootleg flash carts since it needs to interface with a logic chips on the flash cart to switch banks and lock addresses.
For reference, Links Awakening's rom size is roughly 300KB. I'm assuming this is 4MBits, not 4MB, because 4 Megabytes would be ludicrous for 99% of the Gameboy library. Still, 4MBits/500KB is still plenty sizable enough to rip most Gameboy games.
This would be perfect if you could store multiple games on that cartridge. You could just copy loads of games from friends or lent from a library/Blockbuster.
You could with the bigger memory modules. They had a little switch that let you switch between 2 games I believe. All tho u had to use their finicky software which is probably lost by now haha
If anyone is interested in a modern version of this check out the "GBxCart RW". It lets you backup and write ROMs to GB thru GBA. :) (saves and GB Camera pics too!) You will have to source a writable cartridge tho. I just use crappy reproduction carts of pokemon lol.
Yeah that thing is awesome, I use it for my older GB games as I bought the cheapo version that doesn't support GBA. If you have a DS and a flashcart though then you can quite easily dump GBA roms and saves too
I use my ASM Retro ALTANE unfortunately it only dose GB and GBC. In theory it can handle GBA but that's not an officially supported mode and may require a hardware mod.
I just got that last month and it was able to copy over all of my saves and dump all of my games, including the e-reader rom and even my game boy advance video cartridges
It wasn't "allowed." They were sold from the same places that sold other piracy/development/backup hardware and Nintendo was always suing to get this stuff blocked at customs. I know, because I was actively buying this stuff back then. ;)
@@emmettturner9452 Also you can "legally" back up your games technically. I'm guessing the company that sold this possibly used that as their defense when (or if) Nintendo sued.
DISCLAIMER, I AM NOT A LAWYER, PLEASE CONSULT A LAWYER IF YOU PLAN ON DOING ANYTHING QUESTIONABLE Backups are a really nebulous area of fair use. For example, in the United States at least, you *are* allowed to make backups of your media, but you're *not* allowed to break DRM. This is why basically every audio playing program in the 90's could advertise the ability to "convert your CDs into MP3s!", since CDs don't have DRM, but you rarely (if ever) saw any programs being sold in stores advertising the ability to rip DVDs, since DVDs use CSS DRM. If Game Boy games didn't have any DRM encryption on there, then it's not actually "illegal" to make a backup of your game, as long as you aren't distributing it to your friends, and as long as the company doesn't ever mention that you can use this thing for piracy.
That's true, but all Nintendo had to do to get import restrictions slapped on it was show that the primary market was for piracy. I watched it happen. Nintendo was granted US import bans on Bung hardware, Far Front East hardware, Game Jack, and many others... all enforced by US Customs. It's why my Bung V64jr was changed to a two-tone shell and relabeled "E64 - Emulator 64." It's why my Doctor GB Xchanger was debranded with Doctor GB Card 64M renamed to "Mr. Flash." They were trying to get around Nintendo's successful import restrictions on these things.
From what I remember, the Game Boy Camera ROM looks for a specific connection within the cartridge to detect the camera when it boots - if it can't find that, the ROM won't boot up. I saw somebody once manage to remove the camera from the GB Cam cart and bridge a connection to trick it into thinking the camera was still there, but that was the only way it would work!
I had something similar, and I loved it. I remember playing the Zelda games over a very long road trip with the family. One legitimate use that I used mine for was to keep more than one game on a cart with a little menu. I would dump all my games to my PC, and then I would load the games that I wanted to play onto it. It was handy for that since I only had to have one cartridge for my favorite games.
A modern version of the GameJack is the GB01 Game Boy Cartridge Reader. Though it lacks the 4MB flashcart, it supports GBA games as well as GB and GBC. Mine has been invaluable in backing up my Pokémon saves.
you can mod those flash carts, inside that 4 meg card on the board is a socketed flash chip pop it out and put a bigger chip in, even if yours is a soldered one putting a bigger chip on is well worth it. an older channel(retro game tech) actually built one, he bought a load of chips and put a window on the cart, so you could just change the chip to swap the game.
It would be interesting to find a way to use this to copy a save file from an old Pokemon game that somehow has a working battery, slap it onto the 3DS VC versions of the game, and migrate your Charizard from 1998 to Sword/Shield.
Is a working battery really that remarkable? All of my games still save fine but my Pokemon save got corrupted twice over the years. I believe I got my copy of Blue at Gamestop in 2005 or 2006. Did stores ever change the batteries on used games before reselling?
If you want blank flash carts they’re near impossible to find but most of the “reproduction” aka pirated games are just flash carts preloaded with a modified rom. Modified to save save data to flash instead of a battery held RAM
Hi Elliot! Awesome device! Maybe if you publish some high quality pictures of the cartridge board, we are able to reverse engineer the cartridge pcb and make our own...
Just so you know, I have a 68 in 1 and it doesn't run on an agb or ags, you can press some buttons and it'll start a game, but most of the graphics don't load. Try putting it onto a dmg/mgb/cgb.
@@TheRetroFuture It's fiiine, all interesting retro tech. I think the Game Boy Camera and the 860000in1 cart don't work because they use an unsupported / unlicensed MMC mapper, that the copier cannot detect (or the target cartridge cannot mimic). Or yeah maybe they're too big, like you said.
Such backup devices are called "magic computer" or magicom in Japan, though they were eventually outlawed in Japan for fairly obvious reasons.
4 роки тому
you cannot use gb camera on a flashcart because it makes a checksum for the camera first, but you probably can backup your sram from the gb camera if you have any other playable rom that uses SRAM on the Flashcart and then with the PC port you can transfer your gb camera photos.
i think the gameboy camera didnt go over because theres more than just a rom going on in there but all sorts of hardware making the gameboy do more than the gameboy can natively. like the booster chip in starfox's cartridge.
I have this package of stuff as well as the 16M cart with rumble. Super cool back when it came out - I actually held on to a PC with a parallel port for longer than I should have just because of this gadget.
I have a similar product for gameboy advance. If you search for "wise box" and "wise card" for gameboy advance you might find one or two floating around.
Much more testing needs done on this cool device. Can you erase game cartridges? If so, can they have other games put on them? Will other blank cartridges work? Can you manually solder larger storage chip in purple cartridge? Also, test the communication with pc.
It will probably trigger some game's copy protection tho. There are games that detects for SRAM where there shouldn't be any, and if it detects SRAM it displays an anti-piracy message.
A cool thing I found out today if you put a Gameboy game in your advance, turn it on start pressing a b and the d-pad the startup screen will change colors
That was introduced with the GBC when you play old monochrome games. It changes the colors throughout the game, not just the startup screen. If you're interested, have you ever held down Z when turning on a GameCube?
You could also use it to play multiplayer, all the game boy games required each player to have a game. I never actually got to use my GBA 2-player, because none of my friends had any of the same games as me.
I can see that being developed for rental services, not sure what data the parallel port puts out but maybe it could have been used for data logging and tracking rentals into database
Eliot, the biggest game that a Gameboy can handle with optimal bank-switching is 2 mb so 4 mg is more than enough to hold the rom and the save, but I would be interested if it would work with the biggest games in the gameboy's library!
With a custom mapper in the cartridge there's theoretically no limit to the usable size. The 2 megabyte limit is just with Nintendo's mapper chips used with all genuine games. Note this is two megaBYTES and the 4MB cartridge is going to be four megaBITS or half a megabyte. An easy test is to try copying Pokemon as they are 8 megabits or 1 megabyte.
i dont know if you're into old computer games but it would be a great idea to grab a pentium 3 system or something off ebay that has all the old ports for connecting weird accessories like this as well as enjoying some old dos/windows games if you want. Could probably find something for $200 or less
Thanks for the warning ur earlier video I've been waiting for it! Thanks keep up the great content I love it and I'm addicted to your videos and content!
Thanks Elliot. Great Video. Its a parallel port, you can get parallel to usb adapter if you can not find a computer with one built in. Those are kinda wonky sometimes though
I'd love to see another video where you would test other games, like fangames, counterfeit games, Pokemon Gold or Silver with their clock system (if it works, it would have been the best way to clone mons!), and of course your own Retro Future Fangame!
get another game jack and copy from game jack to game jack until the game corrupts
that would be the best video ever
What a nice idea! I would love to see that!
Hahahaha
Yes
Hey! _Don't_ copy that floppy! Have you learnt _nought_ of the wisdom of our ancient forbearers? 😱
I actually own a Game Jack that I got back in the day when the Game Boy was still popular, so I can probably answer a few questions:
- This copier was made by UFO and sold mostly in China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. I don't know how rare the Japanese varient is, but I think the Chinese version is more common(?). I own several UFO products.
- I can see your missing the software CD which is used for connecting your Game Jack via parallel port to your PC. You would need a streight-through parallel cable to use it.
- The game cards go up to 64Mbits. I know, because I own several 64Mbit cards with built in rumble feature.
- Not only can you copy larger games with a bigger card, but you can also use a ROM header/BIOS to load multiple games on a single card and access them via a menu system. You would need to connect the base unit to your PC in order to create a multi-game ROM image.
- This isn't the only system that can duplicate game cartridges without a PC! I also own a Touch Boy copier from Hachi Shi Co, and it looks like a Game Genie, except the extra cartridge slot on the back is used for duplicating games directly with your Game Boy system. It has 32Mbits internally and can store a maximum of 4 games at a single time. So with this card, you don't even need a docking station.
bro wrote an essay
@@kleann he really did didn’t he.
Excellent info! Very cool.
Just wow man, I bet you had a blast with it.
Lol. I knew this thing before. Well living in latin america is way different that anywhere else in videogaming history.
This would be useful when swapping out save batteries in older games, as a way of backup up your save file.
Probably less sketchy than attaching 3v to where the battery attaches while trying to replace it too
You can do it with a gameboyplayer and gbi, for what it's worth. Done it that way myself before.
You could take the back off and replace the batter with the game running so after it's swapped you can save it, but that's sketch too lol.
There was a device called Mega Memory which was inserted between your Gameboy and cartridge which could backup saves and restore them later. Great for avoiding save game loss. I bought mine from "Game" in the UK in around 1998, so they must have been commonly available at some point, but I've never seen them mentioned by anyone else. I bought another one recently, it was so useful! The saves are stored internally and there's no way to export them to PC, unfortunately.
I might need to do this as I still have my original 1998 Red save from when I was a kid (never overwrote it once and shared the file with my mother) and am really sentimentally attached to it.
Im incredibly impressed with just the speed of it! it copies them like nothing
The ones he tested are really small. The Link one is a 2MB one - that was kinda impressive, but also not too much of a surprise. Still nice, not gonna lie.
A shame that finding a decent version of this is practically impossible here in the US.
I'm sure there are plenty of cheap chinese knockoffs but I wonder if there are any good ones.
@@JohnDoe-wq5eu You can order from BennVenn. He's in the us. GBxCart by InsideGadgets ships from australia
@@IngwiePhoenix_nb those do work good. I can confirm.
Interesting item, good find Elliot :-)
Hi!!!
Lol
Omg my mate vince !! Dude you are awesome :D
@my mate Vince - you need one of these to quick repair GB carts that won't boot due to corrupt saves
hello vince
This is actually pretty fire. Imagining an alternate reality where blank GBA/GB cartridges were sold for "backups"
Official Blank GB cartridges were sold in Japan... but to buy new games to put on. Similar to the famicom disk system. They did the same thing with SNES too
@@anonymousidea9119 yeah! The Nintendo power cartridges. He should do a video of finding one with Tetris on it!
You do not have to imagine, they did back in the day but they where off brand and expensive~ and we were all little apple heads so we didn't know any better~
ahh the Gamebomination Advance, the ideal testing console.
😂
I had one of these and used it for homebrew development almost 20 years ago! I remember making a clone of Space Invaders called "Space Evaders". The port is actually a parallel port.
You don't have it anymore? If you still had it you could make a video
@@AtanoKSi I know, that would have been fun. I haven't had a computer with a parallel port in a long time, and I didn't have the foresight to predict UA-cam.
“The game boy SP advance isn’t real, it’s not able to hurt you.”
The game boy SP advance:
I believe it's megabits, not megabytes. 16 Megabytes would have been an absolutely massive amount of flash storage for the early-mid 90s. Even 4 megabytes was quite a lot of flash storage.
I think the largest gameboy ROM sizes were around 8 megabits, which is one megabyte.
This never stops pissing me off.
Correct. It is, in fact, MegaBIT. :)
But hey ho, "16MB" sounds and reads better than "16MiB" right? ^^
It was Megabits
ItS MeGaBitS NoT MeGaByTeS. he isn't going to remake the video just solve this so whats the point in commenting.
Yes. The one he has is a 4 Megabits cart, which holds games with size up to 512 KBytes. The biggest commercially available Game Boy game was that japanese train simulator, with 64 Megabits or 8 Megabytes.
I just repaired my first broken Gameboy that I bought from eBay! Thank you for all the help in your videos
4:15 “look at that, it’s bloody robo cop innit?” 😭 🇬🇧
Hahaha made me hungry for fish n’ chips
I have to say, you have reignited the flame inside of me to collect gameboys, accessories or even other old retro items.
I started wayyyyyy before I found the channel, and as someone who was born just before the GBAs release.. I missed out on a lot of old tech.
I started collecting bits n bobs when I was given my uncles Gameboy Pocket (which strangely enough, we found the battery cover in a completely different house.
I eventually stopped trying to collect games and consoles after finding out how much I was spending per product... Amazon really wasn't the smartest of options.
When I first found your channel I got into the mood to retry collecting consoles, games etc. After advertising Sendico (about a million times ;P) I had to check it out for myself and its wonderful. I've just ordered 6 or 7 products about an hour ago and I'm already hyped for it.
Thanks for you content and everything you have done! Keep it up!
(Apologies for the really long comment :D)
This is interesting, I actually own one of these that I got in a Japanese game lot years ago and never knew what it was for. I've tried to look up information and it was hard to find anything, so it's great to learn a bit more. I have the version with the 4MB card
These were advertised in the states in I believe it was EGM, but it was never released. Although another accessory that was advertised was released for a brief moment...Bleem!...which I still actually own my PC copy & the 4 they made for Dreamcast
I still have my PC copy of bleem! too (that I never actually used sadly)
I could only ever find the MGS and Tekken 3 bleem! for Dreamcast.
Though I also did pick up some PlayStation 2 to Dreamcast controller converters.
7:01 when you’re waiting for the food in the microwave
When the food's done: _game boy startup noise_
As a kid, this thing would have been killer to copy games so I could easily do link cable play with buddies!
2:17 Correction - Megabit (Mb) and not Megabyte (MB) as mentioned here.
instead of using 10 like we should we're going to use 8 and be super confusing and then sometimes we're going to count to 16 and we're going to put letters in there and when it gets to 16 it rolls over to the next one WTF is up with computers
@@bland9876 Nothing can really be done about computers using x^2 based on the boolean working of electronics. I do agree about the bits vs bytes though and don't get me started on GB Vs GiB and so forth when talking about storage.
@@PSNGormond GB vs GiB would be alright if only manufacturers would stick to the damn standard and not mix the two up whenever they feel like it. So frustrating.
I was going to say, 4 MB could probably hold a good chunk of the GB library.
@@bland9876 I feel you there, but I promise it all actually starts to make sense if you study Computer Science. I was about a year into my degree before it finally clicked why binary, octal, and hexadecimal are so useful.
The GB camera might "work" with a big enough cartridge.
From the point of view of the GB, the cartridge is always just storage. Special cartridge will expose dynamic data at specific addresses.
It is possible that the cartridge would show a static image of what the camera was seeing when copying the cartridge.
Imagine using this for Pokemon. This would have been great to have for any multiplayer games that you only had one of.
Gosh I love your channel Elliot! Such wonderful gaming stuff!
I also love the banter you're developing! It's so good! You're becoming a younger Ashens it seems with the sarcasm and wit, and I mean that in the best possible way.
All you need now is a brown sofa
its the dry British humour that i'll always love with these reviewers 😍
"it's bloody Robocop, innit?" is the most British thing I have heard in years. Thank you for that. It made me happy all day.
I remember this thing. Even back when they were still selling it I wondered why anyone would buy it over the Bung GB Xchanger with Doctor GB Card flash cart... which is the system I bought. I still have it but I loaned the 64meg Doctor GB Card v2 to a friend and his dad smashed it with a hammer. D:
Yeah, his parents were separated and he was leaving for the weekend to spend time with his father. I loaded it up with a bunch of games including Pokemon Crystal, which was still Japanese-only at the time. It blew his mind! He probably thought that weekend was his only chance to play Crystal so I'm guessing that his father couldn't tear him away from the Game Boy... so he smashed it.
I recently found it in a pile of stuff and realized that it still works if you press down the flash ROM chip. I reflow this stuff all the time so expect a repair video soon. :)
In the years since I got a Bung Multi Xchanger for the PSX and a Bung Doctor V64jr 512, which works with the Doctor GB Card as part of the "Multi Game Doctor³" (MGD³) series of backup hardware. It lets me use the PlayStation as a CD-ROM drive for the N64! I'm still not sure if I can load games from the GB Card to the V64jr through a PlayStation, but it has the connections to make that possible.
Damn that hurt to read. Love that you may be able to rebuild it!
I've heard someone say that repro pokemon carts work as rewritable cartridges for this thing. Maybe you could give it a go?
What an abusive dickhead that father was. That's like step 1 of how to emotionally abuse someone
@@duffman18 That kind of abuse is probably why his parents split. This kid grew up to be my best friend but I still never met his father, who eventually had a stroke and is now in a care home. Even if the game was coming between them enough to anger him, I can't see that being appropriate. That smashed GBC was a Christmas present from his mom who had so little money I was surprised she could even afford it. I recall he had Smurfs and Pokemon Yellow when his father prematurely ended his childhood Game Boy collection. :(
@@Charky_Creations I know those bootlegs will work as flash carts with other programmers but not with the Bung GB Xchanger. :( Maybe someone could write special software for that but I don't think anyone has since it uses the obsolete parallel port. The main reason to get the Bung unit over the GameJack was because you could put multiple games on one cartridge and I don't think there is a menu program for that on the modern bootleg flash carts since it needs to interface with a logic chips on the flash cart to switch banks and lock addresses.
Damn that would have been super useful when I was younger, my cousin would get all the good GB games before me.
For reference, Links Awakening's rom size is roughly 300KB. I'm assuming this is 4MBits, not 4MB, because 4 Megabytes would be ludicrous for 99% of the Gameboy library. Still, 4MBits/500KB is still plenty sizable enough to rip most Gameboy games.
I like the GameJack! :D I can't wait to have it someday!
Also, Charlie sure killed it on their role!
This would be perfect if you could store multiple games on that cartridge. You could just copy loads of games from friends or lent from a library/Blockbuster.
You could with the bigger memory modules. They had a little switch that let you switch between 2 games I believe. All tho u had to use their finicky software which is probably lost by now haha
If anyone is interested in a modern version of this check out the "GBxCart RW". It lets you backup and write ROMs to GB thru GBA. :) (saves and GB Camera pics too!)
You will have to source a writable cartridge tho. I just use crappy reproduction carts of pokemon lol.
Yeah that thing is awesome, I use it for my older GB games as I bought the cheapo version that doesn't support GBA. If you have a DS and a flashcart though then you can quite easily dump GBA roms and saves too
I use my ASM Retro ALTANE unfortunately it only dose GB and GBC. In theory it can handle GBA but that's not an officially supported mode and may require a hardware mod.
@@Suedeash you can also do it using gbi on the Gameboy player
I just got that last month and it was able to copy over all of my saves and dump all of my games, including the e-reader rom and even my game boy advance video cartridges
Yeah its great, was able to dump my Pokemon emerald rom and save, play it on an emulator on the go, then put the save back on the original cartridge
The GB Game John is better.
... how was this thing allowed to be sold lmao
"Backups"
It wasn't "allowed."
They were sold from the same places that sold other piracy/development/backup hardware and Nintendo was always suing to get this stuff blocked at customs. I know, because I was actively buying this stuff back then. ;)
@@emmettturner9452 Also you can "legally" back up your games technically. I'm guessing the company that sold this possibly used that as their defense when (or if) Nintendo sued.
DISCLAIMER, I AM NOT A LAWYER, PLEASE CONSULT A LAWYER IF YOU PLAN ON DOING ANYTHING QUESTIONABLE
Backups are a really nebulous area of fair use.
For example, in the United States at least, you *are* allowed to make backups of your media, but you're *not* allowed to break DRM. This is why basically every audio playing program in the 90's could advertise the ability to "convert your CDs into MP3s!", since CDs don't have DRM, but you rarely (if ever) saw any programs being sold in stores advertising the ability to rip DVDs, since DVDs use CSS DRM.
If Game Boy games didn't have any DRM encryption on there, then it's not actually "illegal" to make a backup of your game, as long as you aren't distributing it to your friends, and as long as the company doesn't ever mention that you can use this thing for piracy.
That's true, but all Nintendo had to do to get import restrictions slapped on it was show that the primary market was for piracy. I watched it happen. Nintendo was granted US import bans on Bung hardware, Far Front East hardware, Game Jack, and many others... all enforced by US Customs. It's why my Bung V64jr was changed to a two-tone shell and relabeled "E64 - Emulator 64." It's why my Doctor GB Xchanger was debranded with Doctor GB Card 64M renamed to "Mr. Flash." They were trying to get around Nintendo's successful import restrictions on these things.
From what I remember, the Game Boy Camera ROM looks for a specific connection within the cartridge to detect the camera when it boots - if it can't find that, the ROM won't boot up. I saw somebody once manage to remove the camera from the GB Cam cart and bridge a connection to trick it into thinking the camera was still there, but that was the only way it would work!
cool way of saying a rom dump lol i've dumped loads of my friend's games
I’ve taken a dump too
I got a load you can dump.
@@manichispanic999 haha very funy you want a medal? wholesome 100
I've dumped loads ON my friend's games. Got you beat
i eat dumps
This item is perfect for those who want to preserve their save states and not to worry about the internal battery of the cartridge! Great video!
That's actually a really powerful device. Imagine doing this on switch.
I admire you bro! Keep up the good work
It should say "Get JACKED!" on the box
funny enough some guy called Elliot Coll just uploaded a video a few hours ago saying he brought one of these!
6:19 The cartridges actually swapped places! :D
I had something similar, and I loved it. I remember playing the Zelda games over a very long road trip with the family.
One legitimate use that I used mine for was to keep more than one game on a cart with a little menu. I would dump all my games to my PC, and then I would load the games that I wanted to play onto it. It was handy for that since I only had to have one cartridge for my favorite games.
I have a idea Elliot
Make a 3ds that only plays Ds games without the d pad but the circle pad with the top screen smaller
Make a DS Lite with a GBA slot that can natively play GB and GBC games
@@JackMcSomeone
Or combine both of our ideas in to one system to create a mega console
Man, I do miss the old UA-cam intro. Although I've got quite acustomed with this new one, the old one does spark me joy.
Awesome. I like how they've even for vent holes in for the voltage regulator. The PC connections is mostly likely to the parallel port.
A modern version of the GameJack is the GB01 Game Boy Cartridge Reader. Though it lacks the 4MB flashcart, it supports GBA games as well as GB and GBC. Mine has been invaluable in backing up my Pokémon saves.
"It's bloody RoboCop innit" is the most British thing I've ever heard you say.
you can mod those flash carts, inside that 4 meg card on the board is a socketed flash chip pop it out and put a bigger chip in, even if yours is a soldered one putting a bigger chip on is well worth it.
an older channel(retro game tech) actually built one, he bought a load of chips and put a window on the cart, so you could just change the chip to swap the game.
Translucent doesn't even mean invisible…
it means semi-transparent.
The boys reference.
It would be interesting to find a way to use this to copy a save file from an old Pokemon game that somehow has a working battery, slap it onto the 3DS VC versions of the game, and migrate your Charizard from 1998 to Sword/Shield.
That could probably be done with 3DS Homebrew assuming that the VC versions use raw .sav files like what this or an emulator would generate.
Someone actually did this! I dont remember the name of the video but i saw it on youtube a couple weeks ago
Is a working battery really that remarkable? All of my games still save fine but my Pokemon save got corrupted twice over the years. I believe I got my copy of Blue at Gamestop in 2005 or 2006. Did stores ever change the batteries on used games before reselling?
you should try to overwrite an official cart
You can't, official cartridges use a mask rom not a eeprom so they cannot be rewritten
@@nathanmead140 you may be able to overwrite just the save files given they are stored in rewritable storage though
If you want blank flash carts they’re near impossible to find but most of the “reproduction” aka pirated games are just flash carts preloaded with a modified rom. Modified to save save data to flash instead of a battery held RAM
These are awesome for collectors who don't want to take out their expensive cartridges
Hi Elliot! Awesome device! Maybe if you publish some high quality pictures of the cartridge board, we are able to reverse engineer the cartridge pcb and make our own...
Team Rocket's anime scheme to steal pokemons during trade must've gotten the idea from Gameboy Jack!
Just so you know, I have a 68 in 1 and it doesn't run on an agb or ags, you can press some buttons and it'll start a game, but most of the graphics don't load. Try putting it onto a dmg/mgb/cgb.
Cool Video! You should call the gameboy you made "Gameboy Advance XL"
There's already a GBA mod called GameBoy Advance XL.
With how tiny Gameboy roms are, it's not a surprise that a 4MB card stores them with no issues; I could also see a battery in there for saving.
LMAO "it's my save"
*literal beginning*
😂😂 I love it
funny how i subbed to you channel long time ago, but only recenlty i binge on it. lol I love everything GB nostalgia related :P
EZ-Flash Jr is the better buy because I just got one and love it. great video as always.
I got the omega for the gba, they’re great.
@@UzzyT. I have that one also
You need some "definitely not licensed by Nintendo" merch.
Translucent plastic is my favourite retro 90s look, I want this just for that, let alone the real use
> PARALLEL port
> MegaBITS
PS
Whoops
@@TheRetroFuture It's fiiine, all interesting retro tech. I think the Game Boy Camera and the 860000in1 cart don't work because they use an unsupported / unlicensed MMC mapper, that the copier cannot detect (or the target cartridge cannot mimic). Or yeah maybe they're too big, like you said.
Such backup devices are called "magic computer" or magicom in Japan, though they were eventually outlawed in Japan for fairly obvious reasons.
you cannot use gb camera on a flashcart because it makes a checksum for the camera first, but you probably can backup your sram from the gb camera if you have any other playable rom that uses SRAM on the Flashcart and then with the PC port you can transfer your gb camera photos.
Thanks for the content Elliot, keep up the good work!!
Always cool to see weird (unusual) stuff :D greetings from Poland
i think the gameboy camera didnt go over because theres more than just a rom going on in there but all sorts of hardware making the gameboy do more than the gameboy can natively. like the booster chip in starfox's cartridge.
Your an amazing youtuber and my favorite Nintendo youtuber
I have this package of stuff as well as the 16M cart with rumble. Super cool back when it came out - I actually held on to a PC with a parallel port for longer than I should have just because of this gadget.
"Go to your mates house, and make a copy of his BRAND NEW game" 🤣
Good times, love your enthusiasm about all the oddities in the Gameboy world
Brilliant video. It's it me or is your on air sign bulb gone on the R?
Honestly GBA Pro, or GBA+ would be a good name for the custom GBA. It is the ideal GBA after all.
0:14 "I had to order it from Japan" wait, no Sendico shout-out?
1:17: ahhh there we go 👌
I have a similar product for gameboy advance. If you search for "wise box" and "wise card" for gameboy advance you might find one or two floating around.
Much more testing needs done on this cool device. Can you erase game cartridges? If so, can they have other games put on them? Will other blank cartridges work? Can you manually solder larger storage chip in purple cartridge? Also, test the communication with pc.
2:00 That's a DB-25 Parallel Port, these used to be pretty common in the 90s for all sorts of peripherals.
That is a cool bit of kit mate, very cool video
scariest thing ever robocop on gamejack that scared me for years
I think a good use for this is if you want to play a multiplayer game with your friend and only have one copy of the game
Nice, I don't use a gameboy much lately, but I definitely see the use for it. My 6-8 years self would had loved it.
"It's bloody robocop innit" love that 😂
You remind me of what I coulda been like with electrical engineering and stuff but then I dropped out and went to the oil rigs love you 1996
It will probably trigger some game's copy protection tho. There are games that detects for SRAM where there shouldn't be any, and if it detects SRAM it displays an anti-piracy message.
A cool thing I found out today if you put a Gameboy game in your advance, turn it on start
pressing a b and the d-pad the startup screen will change colors
That was introduced with the GBC when you play old monochrome games. It changes the colors throughout the game, not just the startup screen.
If you're interested, have you ever held down Z when turning on a GameCube?
You could also use it to play multiplayer, all the game boy games required each player to have a game. I never actually got to use my GBA 2-player, because none of my friends had any of the same games as me.
"when low quality meets lower quality" lol
I can see that being developed for rental services, not sure what data the parallel port puts out but maybe it could have been used for data logging and tracking rentals into database
Eliot, the biggest game that a Gameboy can handle with optimal bank-switching is 2 mb so 4 mg is more than enough to hold the rom and the save, but I would be interested if it would work with the biggest games in the gameboy's library!
With a custom mapper in the cartridge there's theoretically no limit to the usable size. The 2 megabyte limit is just with Nintendo's mapper chips used with all genuine games. Note this is two megaBYTES and the 4MB cartridge is going to be four megaBITS or half a megabyte. An easy test is to try copying Pokemon as they are 8 megabits or 1 megabyte.
i dont know if you're into old computer games but it would be a great idea to grab a pentium 3 system or something off ebay that has all the old ports for connecting weird accessories like this as well as enjoying some old dos/windows games if you want. Could probably find something for $200 or less
If you have a Nintendo 64 with the Transfer Pak and an Everdrive 64 you can do everything this does apart from writing the blank cartridges.
Thanks for the warning ur earlier video I've been waiting for it! Thanks keep up the great content I love it and I'm addicted to your videos and content!
"Bloody Robocop innit?"
I reckon there, buddy
GB GAMEJACK: *exists*
NINTENDO: hey that's illegal
Something like this would have been great for playing multi-player games on the GBA. You'd only have to have one copy to play a multi pack game.
GB logo appeared so the header is fine, but corrupted graphics or white screen means corrupted ROM.
Don’t worry, Elliot. I love transparent/translucent stuff.
Thanks Elliot. Great Video. Its a parallel port, you can get parallel to usb adapter if you can not find a computer with one built in. Those are kinda wonky sometimes though
Don't bother getting a USB to parallel adapter for this, they only work with the standard printing protocol and not custom interfaces like this.
I'd love to see another video where you would test other games, like fangames, counterfeit games, Pokemon Gold or Silver with their clock system (if it works, it would have been the best way to clone mons!), and of course your own Retro Future Fangame!
I'm surprised at how fast it copies things over. I'm really surprised these were not more popular than they were
5:06 Tetris for Jeff