G6 Flash with a black button
My G6 Flash finally arrived — an old flash cartridge with a black button.
I had never seen one for sale before. Thanks to Sergey, who ordered it straight from China the very day I spotted it and then sent it on to me.
That black button had been bugging me. The explanations online sounded strange: apparently it is needed to launch GST ROM images of Nintendo DS games.
What “needed” actually meant was far from obvious. Hold the button down and GST images somehow start working?
Honestly, without an old guide from the internet I would never have figured out how this button works.
The weirdness started immediately. The old firmware is damn near impossible to find. I also made the smartest possible move and formatted the cartridge without making a backup. Eventually I somehow found firmware 1.5, but then another problem appeared.
The cartridge worked on a GBA SP, but not on a Nintendo DS when used as a regular GBA cartridge. I tested two original “Fat” DS systems and it failed on both.
I searched for guides but found nothing useful. Then I tried the cartridge on a DS Lite — it worked. Then on an iQue DS — that worked too.
At that point I started to get suspicious.
I pulled the cartridge out of the slot ever so slightly, and suddenly it launched normally on both original DS units. I cannot say for sure which side is at fault — the iQue DS and DS Lite are newer revisions — but I am leaning toward the flash cartridge itself.
And then came the third problem: GST ROM images. Where do you even get them?
Oddly enough, ChatGPT came to the rescue and pointed out that my own website hosts GST Universal Patcher 3.1, which can create exactly that kind of ROM image.
We briefly wondered whether the resulting image would really match the old releases, then reached the only sensible conclusion: there was nothing to debate, we just had to try it.
And it worked on the first try. I patched Bomberman with the GST patcher, then wrote the ROM image to the flash cartridge using a U-Reader I already had from another cartridge.
I launch the game — white screen.
At this point I have absolutely no faith that this thing is really going to work the way some ancient internet post claims.
I hold down the black button on the cartridge, quickly power-cycle the Nintendo DS, wait for the Health Warning to disappear, release the button — and somehow, miraculously, the game launches.
It feels like magic.
There is almost no practical value to this today, but the fact that it works is fantastic. The level of hackery in the early DS scene was something else.
P.S. The game worked with both PassKey and NeoFlash's MagicKey. Surprisingly.