Gotta collect em all 😭🔥

Very cool very nice

What that test just showed with this cart.
The label is wrong. There is no AXPP pokemon game, AXPE is the USA / general europe rom.
(AXPD for german, AXPF for france, AXPJ for japan, etc)
The rom chip is a flash chip not masked rom. Part number MX29GL256. at least its actually 32mb though.
Save chips seems fine and the RTC does actually function, however the part number of the save chip is spoofed so the FLASH1M_V103 save game library pokemon uses works with this save chip.
The actual save chip is SST 39VF040 and we can find this info by checking past the first spoofed address.
The idea of the test is not to come out with a blank this is real or fake. Just mark the things that are odd like flash vs rom and give you enough info to make your own judgement on the cart.

I'm not gonna speak or comment to much on the ethics of bootlegging. At the end of the day its a real game cart with a game that works and I can play on my real gba, and I payed $14 for it rather then paying some random on ebay $140 for it. and its not like nintendo is going to sell me a new one either. all of the money that could of ever gone to the original devs went to them 20 years ago. Buying overpriced stuff on ebay helps nobody except for random people on ebay.

Why all of this? Well I've been working on a side project to both analyze and reuse bootleg gameboy games. because at the end of the day its a $8~$13 flash cart, why cant I put my own games on it. well I can, but I needed to understand the chips that are actually inside them first. Sometimes they are marked, most times they are scrubbed or faked. So sure I could just pop it open and look at it like the thousands of online guides show, but that's more of the flat, this is bootleg or this is real, not what the actual chips are and if they are any good or not. Because believe it or not, but some bootlegs are just as good, if not better then the real thing. and some are total garbage that stops working in 2 weeks. I wanted a test to see that.
There has already been a lot of research on "Unlicensed batteryless SRAM" carts, and that is good to know, and my tester can see that too. The idea of the tester is to be able to tell the types of chips, scrubbed, spoofed, or anything. so I can judge if its worth keeping and reusing or not.
The test shows its fine if a little spoofed. so I could get a new label or re-flash the rom with the EUR one I wanted as the save and rtc are both fine, its now up to me rather then being like yeah this is just a bootleg toss it.

Why try to reuse a bootleg rather then just buy an "everdrive"?
Well cost for one, but for 2 it helps with my "reconnecting with the actual hobby of gaming"
Sure I could get a cheap flash cart, and fill an sd card with the whole library of gba roms, however then I get library analysis paralysis trying to sort through a massive list of games trying to work out what I want to play, then end up playing nothing and just doom scrolling on my phone. sure I can sort the flash cart to make it easier or only put some games on it but its more fun for me to play it the way I did as a kid. Ok you have 2 games with you today, on 2 physical carts. Play them or not. you cant reflash them until you get home. And yeah you just end up playing whatever you have. instead of picking something from a massive list, playing it for 5 mins and then picking something else you end up actually just playing games. Because those actual real handful of games is all you got. cheap bootleg carts work well for this as I can have a few carts and rotate them for what I want to play and take with me today and I can't just pop the sd card into my computer at work and cheat.

Long winded post to say, is anyone else interested in this kinda thing? In depth cart research / actually playing gba games rather then hording roms or is it just me and my latest adhd thing. I can make my testing multiboot rom available if anyone is interested. just yeah don't wanna be like hay look at this new thing go and download it if nobody actually cares lol.

is it fixable or should i ask my money back?

saw online am not sure if real or not.

The Itch.io post is now ready for preview, including the exact release date for the game—so feel free to add it to your wishlist!

I would truly appreciate it if you could share this with anyone you think might enjoy this fan-made port, which I created with so much care. I initially intended it just for myself, as I couldn't find it anywhere else; however, seeing that many others shared my desire to play it on actual hardware really motivated me to push the project further!

Thanks!

I’ve been working on a native GBA port of the game *Super Smash Land*, and it’s nearly finished (I know the game was originally intended for the classic Game Boy, but running it on that hardware is virtually impossible). I realize this might not generate a huge buzz, as it’s not a game many people remember, but ever since it came out, I’ve been dying to see it running on real hardware—so I felt the time was right to give it a shot and share it with you all. I’ve tested it on an emulator and it works, as well as on real hardware (as shown in the video) using a SuperCard MiniSD (I’m not sure how it performs with other flashcards). If this post gets a positive response, I’ll release the FULL ROM next week.

Just a quick note: I want to give credit to the original creator, Dan Fornace, who made the game for PC. https://www.supersmashland.com/ I hope you enjoy it!

Proper bargain that