GameBoy / GameBoy Colour USB Save Game / Rom Backup

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This is a modern way of backing up GameBoy / GameBoy Colour save games, over USB on any modern version of Windows, including Windows 10. You can also dump roms of your GameBoy / GameBoy Colour game cartridges over USB

Why backup your GameBoy / GameBoy Colour Save Games?

Most GameBoy cartridges have a small battery inside them with keeps your savegame on the cartridges SRAM. Like ram in your computer when the power source is removed the SRAM looses it contents, this being your save game. At some point the battery powering the SRAM is going to run out of power, wouldn’t it be nice if you could backup your saves to the pc and be able to use them on an emulator or on an Nintendo 3DS virtual console copy of the game?

What you need:

This tutorial is for the J.Rodrigo Cart Flasher for GameBoy, this is a home made USB card flasher in a 3D printed case by J.Rodrigo. Think of it as a usb card reader, however for GameBoy and GameBoy Colour cartridges, its even a similar size to a multi card usb card reader as you can see:



You will also need a Micro USB Cable, if you have an Android or Windows mobile phone the USB cable from this should work fine with the J.Rodrigo Cart Flasher for GameBoy

Software:

GB Cart Flasher for Windows
32bit and 64bit CDM Drivers

On Windows 10 i didn't even require any drivers, i simply connected the Cart Flasher for GameBoy to my PC via my phones Micro USB cable and Windows 10 recognised it and set the drivers up automatically for me, however ive included the drivers above as it's likely you might need them on older versions of Windows.

Windows 10 recognises the Cart Flasher as a USB Serial Port:



With the Cart Flasher connected via USB simply load up the GB Cart Flasher software and you should see it has recognised the device is connected via USB:



Insert the game cartridge you wish to backup a save of or dump a rom of and click "Cart Info", you will see the info about the game cartridge is displayed to the right:



Take note of the rom size and ram size displayed to the right, as you will need to set the FLASH and RAM size to the left.

So in this example the ROM size is 1MB, so this means the FLASH size is 1024KB (1MB = 1024KB) and the RAM size is 32KB:



Now we have set the correct FLASH and RAM sizes, we can read or write to the RAM on the GameBoy game cartridge, esentially backing up or restoring our save games.

Clicking "Read RAM" will backup the savegame on the game cartridge to your PC, you will simply be asked for a file name, then it will be backed up.

Clicking "Write RAM" will ask you to select a save game on your PC to write to the game cartridge, so you might have a save game you have downloaded from the internet you wish to write to your physical cartridge:



This is a pretty quick process only taking a few seconds.

In addition to backing up your savegame you can also dump a rom of your game cartridge, this is done by simply clicking the "Read FLASH button"

The time to dump a rom of your game will vary depending on the size of it, a 1MB game took 2 mins 11 seconds to dump and a 2MB game took exactly double the time at 4 mins 22 seconds.

Now if you have a Flash Cartridge you can also write a rom back to it by clicking "Write Flash" you can't write to a standard game cartridge, it has to be a special Flash Card. You can purchase a 2MB or 4MB Flash Cart from J.Rodrigo also. I don't know if other flash cards will work with the Cart Flasher for GameBoy or not:



Finally you can erase a flash cart by clicking "Erase Flash" or erase a save game from any game cartridge by clicking "Erase Ram":



That's all their really is to it, everything is really user friendly.

To test your save game has dumped ok make sure its named the same as the ROM image
e.g. Gold.GB and Gold.SAV, only the file extensions should be different.

Now load the ROM in an emulator, all the saves I’ve dumped work fine in Visual Boy Advance or TGB Dual:



As you can see from the above photo my Pokemon Gold save has been dumped from the cartridge and is working perfectly in the emulator Visual Boy Advance.

You could now even do a GameBoy save transfer to the Nintendo 3DS if you happen to have a 3DS capable of running homebrew.

I hope this has helped you to discover a modern, easy way to backup your GameBoy and GameBoy Colour games using modern hardware and versions of Windows. This is certainly a much easier method than what i recently used to trade some 17 Year Old Pokemon to the new Sun / Moon games.

Some images of the Images of the Cart Flasher for GameBoy:



I think this is a great independently developed product, it's not made by a company or anything, just someone at home with a passion for electronics from what i gather.

The device is powered via USB and has a green power light, so you know when its on. When you are reading from a cartridge you have a red and blue light which come on to show activity is happening.

The Cart Flasher for GameBoy is certainly a very nice little device and feels like a quality product. If you are looking for a modern solution to backup GameBoy or GameBoy colour saves i'd certainly recommend it.

The alternatives require an old PC with a parallel port, running Windows 95 to XP and hardware which has not been manufactured for the last decade now. You can see the old process in my old guide on how to backup GameBoy and GameBoy Colour save games from retail cartridges.

The Cart Flasher for GameBoy is about as easy as its ever going to get in my opinion.

 

I don't have my Crystal game to hand at the moment, however the easiest thing to do would be to check the SHA1 of your dump. HashCalc is good for this if your on Windows.

If its untouched you should have one of the following SHA1 hashes for an English game.

Crystal English USA / Europe: f4cd194bdee0d04ca4eac29e09b8e4e9d818c133
Crystal English USA / Europe 1.1: f2f52230b536214ef7c9924f483392993e226cfb

 

Check the SHA1 of your dump to a known good dump, does your SHA1 match anything? it's possible they could be bad dumps.

 

HashCalc is good for this if your on Windows.

Open your dump and generate the SHA-1, for example if you dumped Pokemon Crystal and had the SHA-1 of: f4cd194bdee0d04ca4eac29e09b8e4e9d818c133

You can see if that matches anything on https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.php?page=search

In this example it does: https://datomatic.no-intro.org/index.php?page=show_record&s=47&n=0900

 

What com port does it says been assigned if you look in to device manager? you should select USB however.

Chances are you have a different device if it was purchased on Ebay. What drivers / software were recommended for your device?

 

Its possible this software is incompatible with the hardware you have, can the seller provide any insight on what should be used?

It could be faulty hardware, however its honestly hard to say with so little info on the product.

 

As you purchased it on Ebay i'd just request a refund, i don't think you can really do much more to get it working.