Cartridges and Flashers

If you'd like to play your game on an original Game Boy, Game Boy Color, or Game Boy Advance you'll need a cartridge flasher and some ROM cartridges.

There a a number of different cart reader/writer devices out there. They can be used for reading and saving your game ROMs (known as 'ROM dumping'), backing up your game saves (particularly useful when you need to change the coin cell battery on an old cart), and writing game ROMs to flash cartridges.

Flash cartridges come in many different configurations and ROM sizes. Some original Game Boy games, such as Tetris, fit in 32KB of memory, which is the maximum size the Game Boy can address directly on a cartridge without the help of a Memory Block Controller (MBC) to manage grabbing date from larger ROM chips.

Games made with GB Studio will be much bigger than 32KB -- usually somewhere from 138KB and up, so a 512KB, 1MB, 2MB, or 4MB flash cart with an MBC (or FPGA/CPLB facsimile thereof) will be necessary.

Flashing Software

Using the GBxCart RW requires you to plug it into a computer and run some software that can read from and write to the cart. I've found the open source FlashGBX works perfectly and is simple to use.

• Plug in the flasher and cartridge
• Click Connect
• Pick Game Boy mode
• Click Write ROM
• Select the game .gb file from the build directory using the file browser
• The game is written to the cartridge
• Click Disconnect and remove your cart for play

Play

Now, pop the cart into your Game Boy and give it a play!