The history of the emergence and development of Flash cartridges for Game Boy Advance.
Part 1. Attack of the Clones.

Flash Advance Card

On May 31, 2001, the Flash cartridge Flash Advance Card 64M was released.

Looking at this cartridge and the writing device for it, I immediately understood where it came from, because the Game Boy Advance was backward compatible with Game Boy Color games. And for the Game Boy Color, there were also Flash cartridges. This was clearly a device from the well-known Bung. Okay, you caught me, in fact, I didn’t understand anything, and what confused me the most was this: as I wrote above, this cartridge was released on May 31, Flash Advance, and on June 1, 2001, the Flash Advance Card 64M was released. Exactly the same device with exactly the same Card Reader, but with a different sticker:

This cartridge was sold by another company, but even on their website, it was written that the cartridges were the same. By the way, not only were they the same, but they were also terrible. So terrible that you had to use a speed hack and slow down the game so that it wouldn’t crash.

This is clearly not the device users would want!

By the way, the manufacturer understood this too, so they had a program on their website to replace old cartridges with new ones. What new ones, you ask?

Flash Advance Card 64M

And here are the new ones:

This cartridge is called Flash Advance Card 64M and was released on July 28, 2001. Three things can be said about it: it was smaller, had more memory, was faster, and it also had a clone with a different sticker. A strange story, you might say, where and why did the clones come from? But it’s too early to reveal the intrigue, we’ll come back to this a little later.

For now, take a look at the picture with the sizes of the Game Boy Advance cartridges and these Flash cartridges (by the way, it shows that very clone cartridge):

Yes, these Flash cartridges had one big drawback (you can argue what is a bigger drawback: when the cartridge sticks out of the console by half a kilometer or when it’s impossible to play games, but let everyone decide for themselves): they stuck out of the console. Apparently, the creators of the Flash cartridges understood this too, because after these cartridges, on November 9, 2001, they released the Flash Advance Card 256M.

Flash Advance Card 256M

And as you might have guessed, there were two of them:

They were completely identical, had 16 megabytes of memory on board, were damn fast, did not stick out of the console, supported all save options (SRAM, Flash, EEPROM), and have not lost their relevance to this day.

There was only one question: why were there not two versions, as I wrote above, but THREE? After all, in the summer of 2002, such a cartridge was released: Flash2Advance 256M.

Yes, this is the same cartridge, they are completely identical, only with three different stickers.

The vague doubts that tormented me began to take shape in the thought that further progress in the history of these cartridges would not be correct. If I can’t solve one riddle: why and where did three different versions of the same cartridge come from? What preceded this? Where did the three clones come from, a real Santa Barbara, with each subsequent cartridge their number grew.

Let’s start figuring it out.

On one site, I found a mention that this cartridge (Flash 2 Advance) is the last TRUE creation of Bung.

Who is Bung? This is a Chinese company that had a lot of fun pulling Nintendo’s strings, although then Nintendo pulled them back in American and Hong Kong courts, but we’ll get to that later.

So Bung, Bung is Bung Enterprises Ltd. A Hong Kong company that developed a very interesting device:

Yes, this is a Flash cartridge for Game Boy Color, and yes, it reminds you of those past cartridges that we looked at above. And yes, this device allowed you to play pirated games.

Of course, Nintendo didn’t like this at all. And they didn’t like it not only because this device allowed you to play pirated games, but also because similar equipment from developers (Flash cartridges from Nintendo itself) cost a fortune.

This is exactly how these devices were advertised in America: why spend thousands of dollars (and if there are many developers, then tens of thousands of dollars) if for $500 you can provide everyone with this one device. But in many ways, this device was bought not because it was cheaper, but because there was an acute shortage of original devices.

Flash cartridge from Nintendo

Of course, Nintendo wouldn’t be Nintendo if they didn’t sue Bung Enterprises Ltd. and even won the case. So by 2000, Bung was fictitiously closed. Why fictitiously? They closed the organization, announcing it on the website, but immediately created a new company and sent out letters to everyone that if you want to buy those very cartridges, here we are, buy them.

So, Bung closed in 2000, and the first cartridge was released in 2001. We already know that they closed fictitiously, and so here it is - the classic scheme: they created a new organization, which with new enthusiasm took up the sale of this cartridge.

It seems to add up, but the solitaire still didn’t come together, because there were two cartridges.

Here I lost the thread. I tried to look at the websites of Bung Enterprises Ltd., they created 4 sites, but for some reason they didn’t develop and fill them.

I decided to approach it from a different angle: the cartridges were sold by two companies: Visoly (more precisely, the Lik-sang store sold them, but the manufacturer with its own website was the company Visoly) and Success Company.

On one site, I found information that Visoly is a division of Bung. Pulling on this thread, I came to the conclusion that this cannot be true. There are two reasons for this: the first reason is that this does not explain the presence of three identical cartridges, and the second reason is that in the future, the line of cartridges will still split into two different cartridges.

I was at a dead end and was already thinking of writing to an old forum for help, but suddenly I found interesting news:

So, neither Visoly nor Success are the manufacturers of these cartridges, they are just distributors to the eastern and western worlds. As you might have guessed from that news, I wasn’t the only one confused by this story, many others were too. The answer to the question, it seems, was received: two different stores that stocked up from the same factory, relabeled the stickers, and sold them as their own.

Well, "okay," I thought, this is logical and understandable, two different markets, this could well be, you just need to consider these two cartridges as one, and I went looking for the next cartridge in the chronology.

I found it. And as in previous times, it was two cartridges from those very companies Visoly and Success, but if before they were two absolutely identical cartridges, now they became two absolutely different cartridges.

Flash Advance Card Xtreme

In July 2002, Visoly released (and on the Lik-sang.com website it is written that Visoly is the manufacturer and developer of the device) the Flash Advance Xtreme 128M cartridge.

And in parallel with it, that very third cartridge was released:

Flash2Advance

Now it really looked like a rivalry with two different cartridges, although it didn’t last long. In October 2002, Sony and Nintendo shut down Lik-Sang and Visoly along with it.

So, considering that all three cartridges are the same, as well as the words about the TRUE creation of Bung, it turns out that this series of cartridges was the true creation of Bung engineers, and Visoly, starting with the sale of those cartridges, at some point created their own. This, by the way, confirms the theory that Visoly cannot be a division of Bung.

Epilogue

I thought for a long time and here's what I understood: in fact, Bung Enterprises Ltd. continued to produce cartridges, but the story with Nintendo showed them that it was better to stay in the shadows, so they sold their cartridges to the Lik-Sang and Success retail networks. At some point, Visoly decided to do something on their own (maybe this was preceded by a quarrel, or maybe something else).

Lik-Sang couldn't handle the pressure and stopped selling Flash cartridges, while Success continued to sell cartridges for a long time, including the famous Flash 2 Advance.

Somewhere here ends the interesting and strange history of the Flash Advance cartridge. Except that there is something else worth mentioning. In general, that no-name factory (in my opinion, Bung Enterprises Ltd.) will release another cartridge and also fade into oblivion following Visoly. This cartridge is the Flash2Advance Ultra, and it will be interesting because it will have two physical buttons for Real Time Save (saving in real time, for example, before a difficult moment, because usually in Game Boy Advance you could only save at the beginning or end of a level).

This feature was called Die Hard and was first implemented in this cartridge.

In summary, Bung gave us Flash cartridges that fully fit into the Game Boy Advance console, supported all types of saving, and their last cartridge, the Flash2Advance Ultra, also had the Real Time Save function. That is, almost all the functions that a modern Flash cartridge has.

This could have been the end of the story of the emergence and development of Flash cartridges, if not for 2 more companies and 1 person, because of whom Flash cartridges continue to develop to this day. But I will tell you about this in the next article.