Flash Advance Linker and Card - Page 6

Cartridge Backup Tests

Now let's measure the time each copier needs to backup a single cartridge to hard disk. Of course, we needed results for cartridges of the same size. So we decided to use a huge Gameboy Color cartridge, Dragon's Lair (4 Megabytes in Size, aka 32M) and a small Gameboy Advance cartridge, Hot Potato (also 32M).

The software used for communicating with the Flash Advance Linker was once again the Flash Advance Writer version 2.0. You can see a screenshot of the program and all of its features here:

We repeated the procedure for both ECP and EPP parallel port modes. The times that each copier needed are shown on the diagram below:

The Flash Linker appears to be a faster dumper than the GBXChanger, which struggles to keep up. Just imagine that you need only 11 seconds to copy a full Gameboy Advance cartridge to your hard drive.

Flash Card Tests

The following test involves writing a backed up file to the Flash Card. We again needed a big Gameboy Color dump, so we decided to use Alone in the Dark 4 - The New Nightmaire (4 Megabytes in size, aka 32M) and Mario Advance (also 32M). We repeated the flash procedure under both ECP and EPP parallel port mode. The results are pretty surprising here as you can see:

There is a reason for this situation that can explain this. During the write procedure the Flash Linker performs a final verification check to the card before it raises the "OK!" flag. This algorithm slows down the flashing, but ensures that written data are in perfect condition. This is something that the GBXChanger never does, and we have had problems in the past with it and flash cards failing to boot on the Gameboy Color.