This is the second part in a series of posts where I review some odds and ends of retrogaming stuff from China. In the first part I took a look at a Chinese psp clone. In this post, I will write about a Gameboy Advance (GBA) 369-in-1 multicart that I bought from Wish.com. The reason why I wanted this cart was to play GBA games on my Nintendo DS (NDS). The NDS can run GBA carts, but the emulation of GBA roms is not that good.
So, I will not make this a whine-post about how the content of the cartridge consists of a mix of GBA and NES games. Some games are crappy versions of old games, and this applies to most of these carts. As aforementioned, I was mainly after the “classic” GBA games (mainly Mario), and as seen in the images below, I got them: Mario Advance, and Mario Kart etc.
So, I started up the cart, was greeted by the GBA screen on my NDS, and then from the selection of the games, I started Super Mario Advance 2: Super Mario World. The game runs very smoot, without any problems, except for one issue (read further below).
I created a save file in the game, to save my progress. However, when I turned the NDS off, and returned to the game, the save file is gone! The games does _not_ save, which for me is a major deal-breaker.
However, the games does not require saving works fine. Below is Mega Man for NES. However, the NDS does a fine job emulating the NES, so it is kind of pointless running the NES games from this multicart. I already has a good NES emulator, together with a bunch of roms on my NDS.
So, to sum up my short review of the GBA 369in1 multicart:
+Good selection of classic GBA games, including the Mario Advance series, Mario Kart etc.
-Does _not_ save games, which sadly makes the cart rather useless for many games.