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The latest tread among the GBA Flash cart manufacturers are cartridges with atleast 1gigabit (128Mbyte) of storage memory, and 256mbit game flash, meaning that games can not be run directly from the storage flash but has to be copied to the game flash before it can be played. Here we have the EZ Group's attempt on what G6 Flash failed doing. It has to be said though that G6 is currently working on a V2 of their hardware, so they're not dead yet, G6 Flash V1 has hit the stores the past few weeks, looks like they're trying to get rid of the stock already manuactured.

But anyway, here's the EZ3, V3 of a series of GBA copiers which keeps the GBA Linker tradition alive, when pretty much everyone else are using linker cables, EZ is still using the old USB "docking station" Linker, and EZ3 is no exception.

GIFTBOX PACKAGING

So my package arrived today, it only took 2 days to get here from Hong Kong, quite impressive. To my surprise, when opening the package, I discovered a small silver colored box, looking a lot like the box the Extreme Flash Advance came in, hmm I guess someone at EZ got an idea no one else had used before? (right).

On the left, the EZ-Flash 3 box and on the right, the Extreme Flash Advance box

I do understand why EZ adopted the EFA packaging, it presents the product very well. Inside the nice wooden box a linker, cartridge and cable was found, along with a small piece of orange cardboard telling the happy new owner to charge the cartridge 8 hours before using, I don't know what everyone else does, but I'm not charging the cart for 8 hours before using it, I would want to start using this thing right away, so no charging here.

WINDOWS SOFTWARE

No drivers what-so-ever was included in the box, the EZ-Manager software is currently in development and I do understand that the manufacturer would want people to download the latest build, but then how about including a piece of paper with the website address and such? Oh well, I knew where to get the software, www.ezflash.cn, so it wasn't much of a problem for me, but it deserves a mention anyway.

When plugging in the Linker, it was detected right away, how nice, and after unzipping the manager and driver, included in the same package which has no installer, it has to be unzipped instead, I was ready to begin testing the EZ3.

The manager build V1.0 proved to be quite unstable though, slow and a bit disorganized, but once I got the hang of it, it worked... most of the time. It's sad to see that the GBA copier windows software often is very buggy these days and causes lots of crashes for the user, even some that could make you rip your hair out, yes really.

One very buggy piece of windows software

FAT filesystem error - time to format, if you can!

As if that wasn't enough, the buggy windows EZ-Manager software told me that the FAT still was bad after serveral reformats. I had to close down the manager program using the Task Manager, couldn't be closed normally. After restarting the program the format was completed without any form of error, I think, as the format complete dialog box wasn't translated to english. The worst part about these FAT errors is that game saves with hours of playing could be lost when you least expect it, and when a backup doesn't exist.

Please format your EZ3 cartridge

THE CARTRIDGE

The cartridge is manufactured in a nice orange flavour, now if only it could glow in the dark, okay maybe not. The cartridge exist in a 1Gigabit version only, sofar atleast. The cartridge includes 2 types of memory, one for game storage, the 1Gigabit section, where games can not be run from, but only stored, along with save games and other stuff. The other part of the cartridge is the 256mbit game flash section, which could be called a "freebee" from EZ Group, and can be used to run games which won't run directly from the EZ-Disk.

A lot og people seem to think that 1G carts equal 1GigaByte, that's not the fact here though. Videogames has always been counted in megabits, meaning this cartridge is 1Gigabit and not 1GigaByte, 1Gigabit is the same as 128MegaBytes. So here we have 128MegaBye of which 8 are reserved for game saves. Since most games today are 64Megabit (8MegaBytes) you can store quite a few games on this cartridge.

Compared with the G6 Flash, the EZ3 is faster than very very fast. While the G6 Flash needed 39 seconds to copy a 32mbit game, the EZ3 used just under 3 seconds to transfer the very same game, that's fast people! :-)

The usual game upload was made, using a 32mbit binary. Upload directly to the 256mbit game flash took no less than 1 minute and 18 seconds, that's incredibly slow, compared to the Extreme Flash Advance, which used 25 seconds to upload the same binary. Uploading the binary to the 1Gigabit game storage section took 33 seconds, once again slower than the Extreme Flash Advance.

Play time is about 4 hours and 45 minutes, but since 64scener hasn't done this sort of testing before, there's not really much to compare with. The test was done with the Super Mario Advance, our usual testing binary (we of course own the original cartridge), running the the intro over and over, with the sound on max volume. After 4 hours and 15 seconds the red light came on. We haven't done this sort of test before, and the GBA SP used was quite old, but hey not everyone owns a brand new, and 4 hours and 45 minutes doesn't seem like a lot of play time to me.

One of the major changes, besides the use of storage space along with the game flash, is the new user interface, which looks pretty damn cool. The GUI looks a bit like the one on a PocketPC, and that could very well be the reason why EZ Group decided to call it EZPDA, one can only wonder what Microsoft feel about EZ using their Windows logo.

EZPDA Loading screen

EZPDA menu

Besides access to the 1G storage flash section of the cartridge, called EZ-Disk and while there's an optional name when doing a format - the name can not be changed, the cartridge GUI also features a settings menu for changing GUI language and managing the RTC. But that's not it, the GUI also includes a freeware minesweeper game and something called EZ-Word, which is a chinese to english tanslator, I think, cool but kinda useless.

All in all, a very nice looking cartridge, gotta love orange, but also a very cool GUI which was extremely easy to use, though I was missing a lot of options, such as deleting a save game, or that a rom stored on the EZ-Disk could be deleted directly from the cartridge GUI. If we're lucky we may see these features in a future version of EZPDA, the cartridge user interface, along with more customization of the GUI.

SAVE TYPES SUPPORTED

By now Nintendo has created a good bag of different save methods to try to make usage of Flash carts a nightmare and I would of course like to see how many of the latest save methods the EZ3 supports, if I had to do extensive testing though it would take forever to finish this review, so I will only be testing the latest and most used methods.

Please note that the tests are made using the 1Gigabit EZ-DISK part of the cartridge.

SAVE TYPE	GAME USED	RESULT
EEPROM_V120	Super Mario Advance	Save working, no problems noticed
EEPROM_V122	Rock'n Roll Racing	Save working, no problems noticed
EEPROM_V124	Legend of Zelda - The Minish Cap	Save working, but game graphics are messed up when being run on the 1G EZ-Disk
EEPROM_V124	Mario & Luigi - Superstar Saga	Save working, no problems noticed
EEPROM_V124	Legend of Zelda II - Adv. of Link	Does not boot - "GamePak Error"
EEPROM_V124	Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2 - Battle Nexus	Would not boot
FLASH512_V131	Urbz, Sims in the City	Can not be run from the EZ-Disk, 256Mbit game, stopped at 87% "progressed". Runs if it's uploaded directly to the game flash section of the cartridge, but saving failed
FLASH512_V131	Sonic Advance 3	Would not boot
FLASH1M_V102	Super Mario Advance 4 - Super Mario Bros 3	Save working, but choose Spanish as the default language
FLASH1M_V103	Pokémon - Fire Red Version	Save working, no problems noticed
SRAM_V112	Kirby - Nightmare in Dreamland	Save working, no problems noticed
SRAM_V113	F-Zero GP Legend	Save working, no problems noticed

The EZ3 screws up the graphics in quite a lot of games when they're being run from the 1G
EZ-Disk part of the cartridge. Works flawlessly on the 256Mb game flash part of the cartridge.

The linker hasn't changes much since the early days. A EZ-Writer hologram has been added to the back of the box, and the linker is now version 2, so your old linker won't work. Other than that there's not much else to say really, the thing works and that's what matters here.

While everything these days have to be linker cables, so you use your GBA while uploading games, I like the idea of not having to use the GBA as power source when uploading games, here you can upload games to the cartridge while playing something on the GBA, great idea to stick with the "old" way of making GBA copiers :-)

FINAL WORD

The packaging and presentation of the EZ3 was excellent, though I did miss either a driver/software CD or a piece of paper in the box, telling where to download driver and software.

I must say that I was a bit skeptical when I found how that the EZ3 cartridge was built on the same idea as the G6 cartridge, which I had a somewhat bad meeting with. The EZ3 game flash was slow, 1:18 to upload 32mbits is just too much of a wait, but the EZ-Disk and it's 33 seconds upload time, for 32mbits, and just under 2 seconds transfer time to the game flash impressed me. Who knows, the whole idea might have been not to use the 256mbit game flash directly, but instead transfer games from the EZ-Disk backup flash to the game flash? But running games from the backup flash would not always work, I'm guessing because of the various save methods, and sometimes the EZ-Disk FAT would become corrupted.

It's very sad to see a good product being pretty much ruined by bad windows software, just like the G6-Flash. I don't really know what the hurry is to get these products on the street, why not spend a few more months in the lab trying to iron out a few more major bugs before going public? G6 decided to scrap their software and start from scratch, that's a way to do it, but why not get it right the first time around?