Nintendo Game Boy Advance e-Reader

Check the dumping hardware overview for a list of known preservation hardware.

If you need help, please come chat with us on the VGPC or No-Intro discord servers.

Dumping e-Reader cards is reasonably easy if you already have an e-Reader cartridge and a way to read/write saves from GBA cartridges.

1. e-Reader Cartridge (injecting program into save)

You will need a method to read and write saves to the e-Reader cartridge, e.g. most of the dumping methods listed in the GBA page also let you do this.

First, back up the save of your e-Reader cartridge.

Download Flash Dumper v6* and extract it. Inside the flash_dumper_v6 folder, navigate to the jp or us folder based on your e-Reader region and locate the corresponding .sav file:

• e-reader-jp-save-inject-flash-dumper-v6.sav or
• e-reader-us-save-inject-flash-dumper-v6.sav

We need to inject the provided save file into your backed-up e-Reader save, by overwriting the data starting at offset 0x10000 with the data from the provided save.

• Using HxD on Windows:
  1. Open the provided .sav file in HxD, select everything (Ctrl+A), and Copy (Ctrl+C).
  2. Open your backed-up cartridge save in HxD. Press Ctrl+G and type 10000 to jump to the correct offset.
  3. Right-click at that location and select Paste Write (or Ctrl+B).
  4. Save the file (Ctrl+S).
• Linux:

  cp save_backup.sav modified_backup.sav
  dd if=e-reader-us-save-inject-flash-dumper-v6.sav of=modified_backup.sav bs=1 seek=65536 conv=notrunc

Now, flash the modified e-Reader save back to the e-Reader cartridge.

Boot the console with the e-Reader inserted and launch the Flash Dumper v6 program.

To scan a card, press A; the slot will change from an x to an o once the scan is complete. Move to an empty slot (marked with x) and repeat this process for your remaining dot codes.

Once finished, you can power off the console. Back up your e-Reader's save file again.

Navigate to the pc_card_extraction_tool folder (from the extracted flash_dumper_v6.zip) and drag your new save backup onto erdump.exe. This will generate .raw files for each scanned dot code.

• If you are on Linux, compile erdump.c and run ./erdump save_backup.sav.

* SHA256 5e179256ef395dfdd3cf8fe038ad46aae99ae941f9a5545fe8690f55fece6708

Once you've dumped your games, it's time to generate and submit metadata to a preservation project for validating and cataloging. See the dump submission instructions for more information.

The “ROM file” is the .raw file.