Project 1

For the first project, I found it awfully difficult to figure out what constituted a good and solid hack. With limited technical skills and the inspiration of hearing about Nintendo DS hacking, I aimed a step below and decided I should give my Game Boy Advance SP new functionality.

Already able to emulate equal and lesser bit systems with an existing 3rd party accessory, I was able to manipulate the add-on to play movies. The reason for this was to be able to give the GBA some of the same functionality as an iPod.

To achieve this I used the following:

The Game Boy Advance SP,
A GBA CF Reader Cartridge,
Compact Flash Card
Compact Flash Card Reader/Writer

Typically, the CF Cartridge was used to upload old NES Roms to be playable on the GBA using an emulator. The flash card has a folder named “Roms” to which downloaded Roms are placed in. All of which end with the .rom extension. When the GBA is turned on with both the flash card and flash card cartridge inserted, it automatically loads into a boot screen that lists the file names that can be chosen to run. The key was to get a video file and have it converted into a a playable Rom similar to the GBA movies released near the end of the GB life cycle.

For this, software used for the sake of converting movies to be played on a GBA for a GBA cartridge designed to play music and movies was used. The Crystal Engine program for the GBA Movie Player was downloaded from http://gbamovie.com/download.htm and is capable of converting videos to the .gbm format. For this, I converted episodes of Aqua Teen Hunger Force that were about 50 mb each for the 22 minutes or so of video. The converted file was given a .rom extension after the .gbm and moved onto the flash card via the flash card reader. When the GBA was turned on the boot menu allowed me to select the ATHF video as if it were a Rom. I believe this to be because Game Boy movies were probably constructed like a game with no game play but rather a demo that was the video.