Hardware Hurdles: Save backups and creating content
It is hard to avoid the reality that if you want to keep your battery-backed saves, you will have to replace the cart’s battery at some point. But the act of replacing the battery means that you are going to lose your saves, as it’s going to lose power for a small amount of time.
An issue more specific to this site, and retro creators in general, is that the GBA release was 10 years before native screenshot and footage capture tools were available on consoles.
You can navigate around both those obstacles through several different combinations of tools but the solution I went with is the GB Operator.
A smooth operator
This is the GB Operator and it is product by Epilogue. You hook it up to your PC through USB, download the software called Playback from their website and it’s ready to go. You can insert a GB, GBC or GBA cart into the slot and you’ll be playing that game on your monitor within a few seconds.
The GB Operator achieves that by firing up the mGBA emulator to run whichever game you’ve fed to the slot. And once you’re done with your session and are saving your progress, the save is written back to the cart. Which means that next time you put that cart into your actual handheld, your save will be up to date.
While the above is it’s unique selling point, save backups are what caught my attention initially. Switching to the “DATA” tab and clicking on the start button gets the job done. Do be careful not to disconnect the cart while it is happening, though.
A couple more perks that I’ve put to use is a cartridge authenticity check and overriding battery-backed-RTC by using the PC’s clock when the battery has run dry. You can even tweak the Solar Gauge levels for Boktai. There are more features available, including changing the emulator core, but I have no experience with them yet so I do not have much to say. I am planning to use it to trigger long-gone Pokemon events and might report back.
The unavoidable part
This is not a review of the GB Operator, it is more of a showcase of what I use to tackle problems that are relevant to the core of this website. Moreover, the scope of my use case is quite specific. But since I am already putting a spotlight on it, I might as well summarize my thoughts on it as a product.
It succeeds as a hassle-free way of getting GBA games on bigger screen that is accessible by a more open platform for recording and save preservation. It barely needs any setup and the fact that it is made to function with cartridges plays to my preferences. Getting your controller to work is just as easy and the emulator has some nifty features like 2x speed and a selection of visual options to tinker with. Moreover, creating and managing your save backups with the GB Operator is a faster and easier than the alternative options like DS flashcarts.
On the other hand, this is essentially very streamlined software emulation, with the end product being no different that dumping your own ROMs and running them through mGBA. I have also had a save get wiped during the backup process and while it could be due to some kind of user error, I’ve done the exact same thing each time (more than a dozen times since) and it never happened again. The authenticity check feels more like a novelty (and is not 100% accurate, though improvements seem to be on their roadmap) since I already have the cart at my disposal and opening it up is always going to be a better way to check.
After tax and shipping, it cost me the equivalent of about 80 USD. As its value is in the package of capabilities and ease of use, I think the expense is worth it for an enthusiast (or someone running a GBA-centric site). However, you can find each singular it provides elsewhere, in most cases cheaper and in regards to emulation, in a more robust form.
Ask yourself, are there 2 or more features that sound interesting to you? Does having a cool-looking piece of tech factor in your decision-making? If so, I would say it is worth a purchase. If the answer to both is no, you are betting off looking elsewhere for the functionality you are searching for. People point to products like Joey Jr or GBxCart RW as alternatives but the balance between price, availability and convenience is different for those so the choice requires research.
Epilogue
When I started rebuilding my Game Boy Advance library, I was pretty paranoid about losing saves. Modern gaming has a nonvolatile save medium, cloud backups and local backups for saves and going back made me experience some whiplash. Between that and the need for screenshots, this iteration was always going to be part 1 of Hardware Hurdles.
In the future, expect mad ramblings about screen choices, audio and whichever rabbit hole I had to go down when I wanted to improve my experience with the hardware and its inherent quirks.
