EZ Flash IV Tutorial and Setup Guide (GBA Flashcart)

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So you’ve got yourself a new flash cart, eh? Or maybe you’re just curious about this one. Nevertheless, this will be a how to guide on setting up the EZ Flash IV (2015 Micro SD card edition) from start to finish. Check out my review of the EZ Flash IV (2015 Edition).

Requirements

Set up your Micro SD card

  1. Make sure your micro SD Card is formatted to FAT32 so your flash cart will be able to read from it. If you need help formatting your micro SD card to FAT32, try using this formater tool (click on the pic to download).

2. Download the latest firmware kernel for the flash cart (choose only one):

3. Extract the contents and place them in the root of the micro SD card (not in any folders).

The file MUST be named ‘ezfla_up.bin’ (no quotes) and placed on the root of your micro SD card.

First Boot of EZ Flash IV

  1. Insert your micro SD card in to your EZ Flash IV
  2. Insert the EZ Flash IV cartridge into your GBA
  3. BEFORE turning on your GBA make sure you are holding down the RIGHT trigger button. Also, for good measure, plug your GBA into a secure power source (wall outlet).
    WHILE THE CART IS UPDATING DO NOT TURN OFF THE POWER, YOU WILL RUIN YOUR FLASHCART AND THERE IS NO WAY TO FIX IT!​
  4. Turn on your GBA while holding down the RIGHT trigger button, do not turn off your GBA until the EZ Flash IV firmware has been installed.
  5. At first, your EZ Flash IV menu might be in Chinese. Don’t worry, we can easily change the language to English
    • A menu with four icons on the left should appear
    • Select the third from the top.
    • Select the first option
    • Select the second option. Your EZ Flash IV is now in English
  6. You can delete the ezfla_up.bin file from your micro SD card after you’re done.

Congratulations, your EZ Flash IV is now setup! Now we can start putting GBA homebrew and games on it. Unfortunately, it’s not as simple as dragging them and dropping them onto the Micro SD, you’ll have to patch them first. Continue to the next section to find out how.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: As of kernel version 2.0 patching ROMs is no longer required. The kernel is capable of patching on the fly now. However, it comes with a price of slower initial loading times (15 seconds). If this is something, you are interested in, download the latest kernel at EZ Flash Team’s official site . 

How to install GBA ROMs and Homebrew onto your EZ Flash IV

Before proceeding, please see note above.

Downloads

EZ4 Client Tutorial

  1. Unzip the archive wherever you want and open EZ4_Client.exe
  2. Press config and on the “Send Path” field choose your microSD
  3. Press open and select the roms you want on your card (you can select more than one rom if you press Ctrl while selecting them)
  4. Press enter and click on the send button. The roms will be patched and sent to your SD card, now you can put the card in the flashcart and play the games on your Gameboy
Important Notes:

  • Try not to select more than 20 roms at a time, the client tends to crash if you do so
  • If after you start a game you want to play another one you can press A+B+L+Up to get back to the EZ-FLASH IV menu. You can also change this key combination on the EZ4 Client, if you go to Config->Reset Key

EZ GBA Client Tutorial (I recommend this client)

  1. Unzip the archive wherever you want and start ezgba-gui.exe (if you’re on Windows)
  2. Click “Select ROM(s)”
    3. Highlight the ROMs you want to patch and click “Open”
    4. Select options. You might want to create “dummy save file(s)” if you’ve already done this process before and your EZ Flash IV is giving you any problems with saves. You’ll also need to decide if you want to overwrite these .gba files with the patch of if you want to have a separate patched .gba file. Click “Modify-in-place” if you just want to overwrite the file. Finally, click “Patch”.

Enjoy your games!

EZ Flash IV Miscellaneous Helpful Tips

  • If you want to have more than 78 roms on your sd card you have to create multiple folders in your sd card and put at most 78 roms in each folder.
  • Some games are too big, when you select them you will get this message:
    “PSRAM is not enough”. In order to play these games you will need to load them to NOR memory. These games are 32MB (256mbit) in size. To play them just press select, than press (A) for yes and let it write to the NOR memory. You can only have one game written to NOR at a time.
  • GBA Tool Advance (GBATA) (mirror), this is a great little program every EZ4 user should have.
    GBATA is a gba rom tool with the functions below.
    1. Header Viewer
    2. Intro Remover
    3. Overdump Fixer
    4. fix header
    5. Intro Drawer
    6. IPS Patcher
    7. SRAM Patcher
    8. Rom Trimmer
    9. Reboot/Sleep mode
    10. Clock fix for Pokemon sapphire & ruby.

Themes / Skins

By now you may have noticed that the official default theme on the EZ Flash IV is not very pretty. If you downloaded Clearlooks above, you’ve already got a nice looking theme installed.
If you want a different theme, you can change it by updating your flashcart’s kernel but instead of using the official kernel, you can use a kernel that has a different theme on it. You can also make your own themes and then compile the kernel yourself.

Tools

Skins

Screenshots

clearlooks skin  

Review

Check out my review of the EZ Flash IV (2015 Edition) where I cover in-depth the features and pros and cons of this flashcart.