My Purchases
Recently I managed to pick up several rather unusual devices.
1. Barcode Battler — a tabletop game with barcode cards and a console-like device that calculates the outcome of battles.
I still haven't quite figured out how to play it. I bought it as material for a future video, because it was one of the first electronic devices to use ordinary cardboard cards as part of gameplay. Barcode Boy for the Game Boy came a little later, followed by the e-Reader for the Game Boy Advance in the early 2000s.
2. I also bought a Game Boy Advance SP clone — the !QU. I wanted to use it for photos, but the console turned out to be much more interesting than I expected.
Both GameBox and !QU Advance were sold by Russian companies Exeq and iQU Electronics, meaning they were released exclusively for our market. They had the same creator, Maxzhou88, who made the well-known K1 SP and Revo K101+ clones. Many people think !QU Advance is simply a K1 SP clone, but that's not quite true. Yes, GameBox is a clone with severely limited extra features. !QU Advance is much closer to the K1 SP, but still slightly worse — unfortunately, it can't be updated to the latest firmware.
3. My flashcart collection got a small addition too: I managed to buy an XG-Flash. I want to see whether it really is a clone of the first EZ-Flash and whether their readers are interchangeable. Incidentally, this may be one of the earliest versions, because they were only sold in this color at the very beginning.
4. I couldn't pass up the Action Replay Max either. This device can be used to hack both Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS cartridges. It plugs into the Nintendo DS's Game Boy Advance slot, and the device itself accepts both NDS and GBA cartridges. I'm not much of a cheat-code person, but I want to see how well it actually works.
5. A Road Rash cartridge for Game Boy arrived from the UK. The game itself isn't especially interesting to me, but people said this cartridge was unusual because it uses undocumented quirks of the Game Boy consoles' CPUs. That turned out to be true: despite being an original cartridge, it won't run properly on the GBC or GBA — technically it starts, then freezes.
6. A DSTT flashcart also arrived from the UK. I bought it for the collection and possibly as material for future articles and videos.
7. And the last two purchases: a Metroid Prime Hunters demo cartridge and an NDS Magic Key.
These cartridges are directly tied to the history of Nintendo DS hacking. The Metroid Prime Hunters demo came bundled with the very first version of the Nintendo DS, which launched first in North America. That made this cartridge central to the early hack, since every buyer had one.
NDS Magic Key, meanwhile, was the first PassMe variant that allowed commercial games to run on the Nintendo DS — in other words, it was used specifically for piracy. You can read more in the site's section: “The History of Flashcarts.”