EZ-Flash USA Forum

Newbie here ! Just got an 8gb EZ-Flash 3 today for my GBA SP.
Good job someone pointed me to these forums, otherwise I'd probably still be tearing my hair out trying to install it. I've learned a lot today !

Anyway, after finally getting it all working a couple of hours ago, I decided to try some game roms.
I've so far installed about 10 and had a quick play of them for a few minutes each.

So far, 3 of them have already had problems :

Atari Anniversary Advance : When you start, you get a wrap-around scrolling menu of the games you can play. Once you reach the ATARI TRIVIA section, the control pad freezes. Music contains to play and the graphics continue to animate, but the control pad and buttons now do nothing.
Only option was to switch off the GBA.
I tried 2 different versions of this (Europe & US I think), both had the same problem.

Activision Antholgy : Can get the games to start fine, but pausing any of them causes an instant 'hang'. The screen tells you to press 'B' to continue, but it doesn't work and the game is basically frozen, requiring you to switch off the GBA.

Iridion 2 : Freezes near the end of the first level. That said, I've just found an older thread on here with someone who had the same problem with this particular rom version (E). Said he then tried the (U) version and it worked fine, so I'll give that a try tommorrow.

Even so, this is a pretty dissapointing start for me so far (and there's still the worry that some of the other 10 games might crash if I play them for longer periods).

What do you guys think ? Anyone else had similar experiences with these games ?
Have I just been very unlucky in choosing several of a tiny percentage of games that don't work properly, or do quite a lot of games have problems like this ?

Oh, another thought. These games all came from a single downloaded rar file. Could it be possible that this particular file has games with errors, and that I might have better luck if I downloaded them elsewhere ?

Thanks for any help (and apologies for the long post !).

A long post explaining what you have done is quite helpful for such situations so there absolutely no need to apologise.

First things first stick the cart in the linker for 8 hours if you have not already, you do not want the save battery dying on you (once charged it will last for ages).

You may just have picked some roms that do not work too good but I doubt it.

First things first make sure you have clean roms/check your roms are not broken: http://www.sosuke.com/ezflash/wiki/index.php/Clean_roms

Also try EZManager 2.08 from the downloads forum as it is probably the best for GBA (2.09 and above have been DS focused), grab the ezflash.bin from the current release of EZManager though (ezflash.bin is the internal list of games).
Anyway if a rom is having issues try writing it without compression, cheats, soft reset or instant save and then seeing (all these extra features add to the experience and are often on by default but can cause roms to do what you are seeing).

Thanks for your post FAST6191.

As an update, I've now tried 40+ more roms and these have all worked perfectly (an English version of Super Mario Bros 3 gave me a white screen, but then I tried the US version and that worked fine).

Still no luck with Atari Anniversary Advance & Activision Antholgy though, and I've tried several versions of each (not overly fussed about these though).
Wonder if these work ok for everyone else ?

Likewise, no luck with the other version of Iridion 2 I tried (still freezes at the same place).

My batting average is more than acceptable now though

By the way, I've been using version 2.20 of EZManager with the latest drivers.
None of the games I've transferred have been trimmed, and none have had instant save or cheats added.
Some include the soft-reset option, but it seems to be impossible to switch off.

I did download EZManager 2.08 like you suggested, but whenever I run it, it won't bring up the games list & tells me my card needs to be formatted (if I then go back to version 2.20, the games list comes up straight away).
Don't really fancy having to reformat my card and transfer all the games again in the slight hope that the one game I want that isn't currently working (Iridion 2) will run ok on 2.08.

Anyway, like I said, my initial dissapointment has very much disappeared now

some managers work differently from others for some reason
sometimes you need to load the manager and unplug the USB or unplug the cart
then plug it all back in with the manager still open and it will show up
sometimes need to do this 2 or 3 times before it will show up
not recommneding that tho becuz im sure its not healthy for anything doing that
but its just a tip if you really need a certain manager to work for whatever reason