GBA:Creating Game Backups
As you may want to preserve your original GBA games, there are a couple of different ways to create a copy of your games.
Link cable method
Requirements:
- A Gameboy Advance or Gameboy Advance SP
- A homebrewed Gamecube or Gamecube-compatible Wii
- An SD card
- A Gamecube GBA Link cable
- GBA Link cable dumper
- A Gamecube controller
- Additionally, for modded Gamecubes, an SD Gecko will be required.
Firstly, download GBA Link cable dumper and place it on your SD card:
- For Gamecubes using Swiss, place linkcabledump_gc.dol on the root of your SD card
- For Wiis, create a folder in apps titled "linkcabledump" and place the linkcabledump_wii.dol inside and rename it to boot.dol
Launch GBA Link cable dumper via your preferred method on Gamecube (Swiss, savegame exploit, etc.) or through the Homebrew Channel on Wii.
Once it has launched, connect your GBA via the link cable to controller port 2 (and on Wii your Gamecube controller to port 1) and turn it on without a game inserted or holding START+SELECT while a game is inserted.
After a short moment, you will be prompted if you wish to dump the game that is currently inserted or the GBA BIOS.
Insert the GBA game you want to dump into the GBA cart slot and press A to start dumping.
This process will take a long time, especially with large ROMs. Even a 4 MB ROM will take about 6 minutes due to the slow serial interface.
To exit the application once you're done, simply press START on your Gamecube controller and turn off the GBA.
This method does not work with Gameboy and Gameboy Color games, as inserting one will physically switch the GBA's BIOS to the backwards-compatible one.