Supercard SD for Gameboy Advance SP

"So what is this device," you ask? It's a flashcart for the Gameboy Advance. Unlike typical flashcarts that only have built-in memory, this one sports 256Mbit (32MByte) of RAM, as well as an expansion slot for a SD memory card. I currently have a 1GByte SD card in mine. Game cartridges are usually measured in Megabits, but don't ask me why. There are 8bits in a byte as we all know.

This device allows you to load backups of your GBA (Gameboy Advance) games and then play them in your Gameboy. Most games are around 4MB-8MB so you can fit a ton of them. If you have a 1GB SD card you can fit around 150 games. A 256MB SD card will probably hold 40 or so games.

As I mentioned before, the device has 32MB of onboard RAM. When you run a game, the device reads the ROM image from the memory card and loads it into RAM. It takes anywhere from 10-30 secs, depending on the size of the game. Most of the games I have works fine. There are a few that don't work. They either don't load or run really slow.

Not only can it run GBA games, it can also run NES, Gamegear, Turbo Graphix 16, Sega Master System, and older Gameboy games. The Supercard has built-in emulators to run these classic systems. You just have to supply the ROM images of the games. I find myself playing the NES games more than the GBA games. I'm more of retro gamer myself.

The games have to be "patched" before they run on the Supercard. The included software formats the games so the SC can read them properly. It also has a really neat feature called "Real Time Save". Basically you can save where you are at any point in the game. The next time, you load it up the game, you'll start at the exact point where you last left off.

You can also use it to load music/movies/images/text. Due to limitations of the GBA hardware, MP3s have to be converted into .GBS format before you can play them. The software it uses takes about 5 secs per song to convert. The quality is decent but nothing like the original MP3 file. At the highest quality mode, I think it's 22kHz, 16bit, stereo or something like that.

Pictures can be viewed on the SC as well. The supplied image converter isn't that great so I use another one called GBAJpegViewer. The quality is pretty good.

Movies can also be loaded onto it and viewed. The SC has software that converts .AVI/.VOB/.WMV/.RMVB/etc to .GBM/.GBS format. It takes about 15-20mins to convert a 30min cartoon episode at Normal quality. However when converting, live action movies, it takes a really really long time! A 90min movie took me 6 hours or so to convert. I don't really use it for movies since it takes so long to convert movies. Also the quality isn't that great.

It costs about $55US for the SC alone but it's well worth it. You basically have a complete entertainment system in the palm of your hand. Movies/music/images/text and of course games.

There is also an older Compact Flash version of the Supercard. As you can see the CF card actually sticks out. With the SD version the SD card is fully inserted into the Supercard. About 1cm of the SC sticks out from the GBA.