Kodewerx

Thank you all in advance~
1) It is my understanding that gba games cannot played on the R4 because (etc.) However I understand that It does play a variety of homebrew games. This is where my question comes in... Would it be possible then to convert a gba game into the nds format? I mean if people can make homebrew games and save them in Nds format would it not be possible to just convert the Gba game?

2) I was also wondering, is it possible to make a music patch for handheld game (ex. Megaman starforce 2) so that everytime a certain action is done a song (preferably a song not in the game (ex. Metallica music everytime I battle viruses or bosses)) of my liking would play rather than what would normally play?

I'm not asking for a request (yet) just wanna know if it is possible and if it would be probable that eventually someone would start taking requests such as these.

Thanks again~


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Short answer: no and no.

It's theoretically possible to run a GBA game in DS mode, because the hardware is so similar. However, memory mapping, I/O registers, graphic/sound system, and CPU speeds all change, so a lot of the code would need to be modified. If you have the game's source code, it's not difficult to port, but hacking a game to do it would be nearly impossible in practise. (Virtualizaztion would also be possible, but slow.)
Your best bet is to get a slot-2 RAM cartridge. That will let you play GBA games stored on a slot-1 card.

Hacking the game to change which song plays at a certain point is pretty easy, but adding new songs is pretty difficult. Even when you can (you need to figure out the music format, which can be very complicated), most games use a MIDI-like format, so it's not possible to just drop in an MP3. You'd have to convert a MIDI or write your own music. (And no, you can't really convert MP3 to MIDI; they're very different things. Look it up.)

The only thing you could really do is get an M3 or similar adaptor (that has a CF or SD slot), program your own music engine in place of the game's, and have it play WAVs from the CF/SD card. (MP3 would still take too much CPU power; even DS can't really play MP3 and do anything else simultaneously.) And it'd still sound like shit, because the sound hardware isn't very powerful.

Summary: these things can be done, but the amount of work involved is exponentially beyond being worth it. You'd be much better off buying a GBA RAM cartridge, and listening to music on an actual music player (either turning the game sound right off or hacking it to not play any music).

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