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The Flash Advance 128mbit cartridge, now almost same size as a normal GBA cartridge.

Thanks to the Success Company (aka UFO Company) I am able to bring you a small review of the 128mbit cartridge which I've now had access to a week or so to be able to check it out.

We all probably know by now that the Chinese manufacturer, who remains unknown to the public, has learned a serious lesson from the many faulty 64mbit cartridges, they even managed to make 4 or 5 revisions of the cartridge before finally changing the design completely, for the better I hope as I do not have the new 64mbit cartridge yet.

One of the new ideas the manufacturer got was to change the size of the cartridge to near GBA cartridge size, I doubt it could be or even look better than it actualy does. The disadvange about the original GBX style cartridge was that it could be inserted into the Gameboy or Gameboy Color which might result in a non-working cart afterwards, it's only wild guessing though as I have not dared to check it out, but a sticker on the old 64mbit carts did warn you about using them with the Gameboy Classic (black/white) or Color version.

With the new design this problem is now solved and it does not fit in the Gameboy Classic and Color anymore. I've tested quite a few games and demos now with no negative results. The only game which ever gave me any problems on my 64mbit cartridge was Yugioh Duel by Konami, which crashed when battle cards were being given. so I ofcourse loaded this onto the 128mbit cart to see how it would react, took 140 seconds to flash the 64mbit, playing the game for five minutes without crashes or any other notable errors, cards were given and went well past the usual crashing spot on my old 64mbit cart, revision AB4.

But why buy a 128mbit cartridge? Well right now there are no games of this size, but the maximum size of a GBA game is 256mbit, so it will happen eventually, some may even go beyond this size, but I doubt it will happen anytime soon at all. But are you one of the many who likes to put more than one game on a cartridge to bring on car trips and such, then this is a great buy as you can fit 4 x 32mbit games or 2 x 64mbit games on this cartridge.

It was said the 128mbit cartridge would include EEPROM once it got released, however just a few days before the release, the manufacturer announced that the cart would not include EEPROM due to some unknown reason, said to be the size of EEPROM which could be changed quickly by Nintendo.

Fact it that the game only includes SRAM, which is the only bad thing I could say about the cartridge I believe. Keep in mind that generic EEPROM-2-SRAM converters are out now, so it's not really that big a deal, and there wouldn't have been room for an EEPROM in the new style cartridge anyway?

In all a great cartridge without crashes, not saying that it will never happen ;)

Thanks to the Success (UFO) Company for the sample, click here to visit their site.