BOMA (Boot-o-Mat Advance)
What is BOMA?
BOMA is a program that can patch your roms so you will be able to get back to the game selection menu without having to turn your GBA off and on. This is very neat and I recommend it for everyone to use. After patching you can press START + SELECT + L + R at anytime during the game to get back to the menu and select a different game. It also patches the game so you can reset it and start from the beginning by pressing START + SELECT + A +B. Many games have this feature already, but some others doesn't and that's were BOMA comes in.
So how do I use it?
First of all... Download BOMA (version 1.2). The program itself is very easy to use. I'll go though the process. Unzip and open BOMA Front-End.exe. This is what you will see:
Adding games is very simple. Either drag them into the BOMA window or click the Add button and select them from there. They will be added to the list.
Once you have added all the games you want to patch, click Patch All. But before you do, let me explain the options next to the Patch All button.
Manual mode: On some games there are more than one location or "reset spot" that needs to be patched. For example one at the intro and one at the menu. If this options is UNchecked it will only patch the first spot which will be right after the game has started. This also means that you can only reset the game right after the game has started and NOT any other places like during gameplay. If you check this option it will start to emulate the game once you click Patch all. It will then patch all reset spots it can find. When you click ESC it closes and moves along to the next game. If you want to be sure it's patched correctly, you should check this option and wait for the menu to start or maybe go into gameplay. But don't get me wrong, there are very few games that needs this. Most games will work fine even if you leave it unchecked. But if you patch a game and find out later that the reset method simply doesn't work then that is the problem, and you should patch it again with Manual mode checked. Some games that needs this is Rayman Advance and Need for Speed Underground.
Preserve intro: Some games have Intros made by the cracking group that dumped and released the game. Usually BOMA will disable those intros. But sometimes disabling the intro will make the game not start at all. In such cases check this option to leave the intro as it is.
Trim files: This option will remove useless bytes at the end of the rom so it will take less space. This way you don't have to do it with GBATA.
Usually I just check them all.
If you checked Manual mode it will start to emulate SOME games. Others it will just automatically close after half a second and then move along to the next game. As you can see two locations where added. Those two were right after each other so I didn't really have to check Manual mode here. Click ESC to stop emulating and patch the next game.
This is what my example looks like when all games have been patched. Both OK and PATCHED means the game was patched correctly. Those with PATCHED were skipped and those with OK were emulated and stopped manually by me. Now you're done! Close the program. You don't need to save or anything. The roms have been overwritten over the original filenames already.
That's it for now. If you need more info read the readme that comes with BOMA.