Well, I'm still on holidays, but occasionally I still get emails regarding Gamejack and GBC Bios, etc. Unfortunately, I dont carry these things around with me, and even worse, it looks like half the sites I reference from this site dont work any more. Thus, no GBC bios to be found anywhere.

When I do finally make it back to my home country, I will do my best to have a look around my old PC and see what I can come up with.. or even transfer the one GBC bios I have on my one and only cart. And then I will stick it up on this site for downloading. Until then, you'll just have to go to that next page on your search engine to see if someone else them.

GameJack is a hardware product put out by UFO to allow transfer of Gameboy cart information from cart to cart and from PC to cart. This is the story of how I got mine working

Before you read the rest of this, you may want to visit a couple of sites. These sites have some useful information, and I may reference them in the telling of the story.

• www.reinerziegler.de. This man (Reiner Ziegler) seems to be "Da Man" when it comes to serious GameBoy hardware and software development. He has lots of stuff on his GameBoy page which you will find interesting and enlightening. If you have a GameJack, however, you probably wont need to use any of it. In the long run, I didnt.
• www.subport.org. There is a tools page on the subport.org site. Its a very good reference for most things Gameboy, and you will need to vist here to get your Gamejack working properly, especially if you have a Gameboy Colo(u)r.
• Gameboy Developers Site. Derp. If you havent been here yet, then take a visit. Lotsa Gameboy stuff.
• Setting up the GB Gamejack - by David Koontz. This page was my first hit for finding help for the GameJack. It almost has all the information, so read it first.. my bits will give a little more info on the rest of the story.

So I finally received my Gamejack, and it had everything I expected, including the CD, excluding really clear instructions on how to use it effectively with the PC.

I actually ordered a 16M cart, so if you have a 64M, then beware.. I have seen things on the net (checkout the subport site) that say loading certain things (like a new bios) will kill the card forever. Since I dont have a 64M cart, I aint going to worry about it too much.

So, I leave it in the packet for a bit, because I had alot of other exciting things to do first.. then I come to get it working.. and it doesnt.. and that sucked.. until I did the following

Make sure you have the ECP parallel port setup correctly. Check your BIOS and then check the drivers you have installed. It better all be ECP, or it wont work.

Construct the cable. In my particular experience, it wasnt enough just to have a male-female parallel cable.. I needed to get a DB25 to Centronix cable. Also known as a Printer Cable. It has the suspiciously non parallel connection at one end. Then you will need to get an adaptor to convert from the centronix back to the DB25. Plug them together. Then you will probably need a gender bender so that you can hook the cable from your PC to the GB Gamejack.

I'm based in Brisbane, Australia. Harvey Norman and Tandy (re: Radioshack) were particular unhelpful with getting these bits. The computer department in Myer in the city was particularly helpful and had all the bits right there. If you're located anywhere else, you'll find the bits soon enough.

Now you're almost set to go. Install the GB Gamejack software. Hook up the cables between the PC and the Gamejack, put the 16M cart in the second slot (the one on the right). Make sure you are using power from the mains.. not the battery. Put the cart onto "Auto". Switch the Gamejack to OFF, and then back to PC for good measure.

First you will need to load a BIOS onto the cart. Fire up the GBTOOLS.EXE. The delay of 2 worked fine for me. Now Upload the BIOS. There is one supplied with the software package in the BIOS directory. A DOS box will pop up and it will erase the CART and then upload the new BIOS.. It'll be really quick, so you may miss it.

Now load a shareware game provided by the software package. Do a Upload ROM from File. Select tetris.gb or something funky like that. It'll take a little longer, but not much longer. If it has worked, you should now be able to remove the cart, whack it in your GB and play tetris. If it didnt work, perhaps try reseting the Gamejack by switching it from OFF to PC again whilst the cart is in the slot. Perhaps try the a delay factor of 3. Otherwise, I dont know.. this is merely my experience.

Now you want to do funky things.. multiple games and all of that. First you'll need a decent BIOS for your Gameboy Color because the one supplied with the software wont handle Gameboy Color games. If you go to the subport site and look under Gamejack/UFO in the Tools section, there will be a pack of BIOSs available. Download it and extract it. Load the BIOS for 16mcgb or something like that. You'll be able to identify it as being for the 16M cart and for GBC. Anyway, load it onto the 16M cart as described earlier.

Now for multiple funky games. The cool thing with this BIOS is that it recognises if there are multiple games on the cart. So just do the copy /b game1.gb+game2.gb+game3.gbc+game4.cgb mygamepack.gb and then load that pack using Upload ROM from File. Then when that is finished, try it out on your Gameboy. Dont forget to leave the cart switched to AUTO, or the funky BIOS menu thing wont happen. Also, this upload will take a while longer. Luckily there are lotsa dots on the DOS window to show that it is doing something and there will be a colourful light show on the Gamejack to also show that it is doing something.

Now, I only just did this on the weekend. It seemed to go ok. All games that I did were operational. Most games even did the save game thing. There may be other problems that I have not seen, yet.

Here's some standard stuff. Dont ask me about commercial ROMs. Coping commercial ROMs if you havent bought the original is unethical and unlawful.. its just bad. *slap*.. that was just for thinking about it.

I recently received some feedback from Oscar Boué of Spain.

He tells of his experience with the 64M Cart (with rumble pack) he bought some time in February 2000 and how he overcame the Upload BIOS problem.

The first time he tried to upload the 64M colour BIOS, the upload crashed. His final solution was to leave the standard BIOS on the cart, and when he creates his multi .gbc pack, he puts the colour BIOS at the start. For example, copy /b GB64M.GBC+game1.gbc+game2.gbc pack.gbc. Because he loaded the BIOS onto the cart earlier (and it failed), he needed to switch the cart to MB5, otherwise it would crash. Oscar pointed out that whilst loading the 64M colour BIOS did not ruin the cart, you will need to prepend the BIOS to pack.gbc. He also pointed out that you also waste 32Kbytes because the real BIOS area is useless.

This was Oscars' experience with the 64M cart. If he has been using this method since Feb, 2000, then it must be ok. He hopes it helps anyone out there with a 64 cart, but does give the warning, as do I, use it at your own risk!

I've received quite a few feedback emails, and I've been a bit of a slacker in answering. Anyway, here are some questions and answers from various people, who can remain nameless to protect the guilty, etc, etc.

Where did you get your gamejack from? I got mine from www.cd64.com/gamejack.htm

Why dont you return my calls? :) I'm going on leave in April 2001 for a couple of years. As a result, I wont have time to answer emails, because I'll be travelling around the globe, having fun and all that stuff. This gamejack stuff.. I dont do it full time, not even half time.. in fact, the novelty wore off after two weeks and I really havent touched it since. You're welcome to send emails, and I'll answer as best I can, if I can, but if its not on the web page, I might not have any other useful information that its out there somewhere else.

My laplink cable wont work. No, it wont. You definitely need an ECP compat. cable. Since I'm not a cable wiz, I dont know if this is the same as a 25 to 25 pin cable. If you do discover if it is the same, gimme a bell, and I'll put it up on the page.

I can only get 2 megabytes on my 16M cart, before it crashes!! That 16M means mega bits, not mega bytes. 16M = 2Mb, 64M = 8Mb, 4M = 512Kb.

I was wondering if the gb gamejack cartridges had the 'time' feature on them for eg. playing pokemon gold on.? I dont know. I'm not familiar with Pokemon gold and its game play. I have hard enough time watching it on TV (why did DragonBallZ go, why!?). And I dont program GBs, so I'm afraid that I dont know about the time function.

I received a help email from Rafael today. He told me that he thought he had crashed his cart, even though it had been working fine at one point. It turns out that he was using an AC/DC Adaptor set at 9 volts, and this worked initially, but then it wouldnt when he loaded a new BIOS.

Once the adaptor was set to 12 Volts to worked great. So, lesson learned is that if the 9 volts doesnt work originally, perhaps try 12 volts.

Gamejack doco says it uses between 7.5 and 12 volts. Dont go any higher than 12 volts.

Thanks Raf!

I'm signing off... I'm on holidays from the end of next week for two years. I'll be tripping through New Zealand, Canada, UK, Ireland, Turkey, USA and Mexico, and any other place that tickles my fancy. Whilst I'm gone, I wont be fielding GameJack questions.

I want to thank all the people who have given me great feedback, and I hope it continues to help.

In the meantime, checkout the rest of my website...