GBATA
GBATA is a MUST for ANY flashcart user. I strongly recommend that you use this tool for your patching or trimming needs. It's the ultimate tool for doing pretty much anything to your roms. The latest version is 0.7. Get it here.
When you open the program you will see a window similar to this. It will show you any kind of info about your rom. Of course, you must load a rom at the top to be able to see it. Most of the stuff doesn't really need an explanation or isn't important. But if you are going to patch your rom you should check out what it says at the Save Type. Remember that FLASH or EEPROM savetypes MUST be flashed in order to work on the X-Rom. But if the savetype is already SRAM, you don't have to patch it.
We'll just go through all the tabs. Remove intro will try to delete the intro or cracktro that some release groups put into their roms. By all means, this is not necessary at all. But some people might find it annoying to see the intro each time the rom is loaded. At least if the intro is long and can't be skipped. GBATA will automatically try to find the correct offset value. If it manages to do so the Remove button won't be grayed out and the value will be something else than 080000C0. But you can also enter your own value if you know the correct one. The rom I've loaded doesn't have any intro so naturally GBATA wont find it either. The Draw option will create a .GBA rom with only the intro inside instead of removing it from the rom you have loaded like Remove does.
Overdump means that the release group released the rom with a bigger filesize than the game actually uses. An example of such a game is The Powerpuff Girls - Mojo Jojo A-Go-Go (U). Fixing overdumps is NOT the same thing as trimming. And you can't use this to simply half the size of a rom. It only works on roms that have been overdumped to start with.
The Clock Fix will remove the RTC from games that use it. This is mainly for carts that doesn't have a RTC built-in feature, but the X-Rom does so there's really no need for this fix. RTC games will work just like on the original, without any patches or fixes.
Before you do anything here there is one very important thing to note: The reboot patch will corrupt your roms! So do NOT use it! Use BOMA instead. It's much better anyway because it allows you to get back to the menu as well. I haven't really tested the sleep mode patch so I'm not sure if it works or not.
This is just what it looks like. Some games need IPS patches to work, while other patches are just trainers, fixes, intro removers or stuff like that. So this is a feature that will come in handy. It's not just limited to GBA roms either. You can use it on any kind of rom or even files like exe's etc.
This is probably the feature you will be using the most. Well, along with the trimmer. Any rom that uses FLASH or EEPROM saving must be SRAM patched in order to work on X-Rom. Note that LittleWriter has this feature built-in if the plug-in is turned on.
The trim feature is extremely useful. Trimming a rom means that you cut off the useless bytes at the end of the rom. ALL roms have set file sizes to 16mbit, 32mbit, 64mbit, 128mbit etc. If a game is less than this size after it has been developed, the developers will add more bytes at the end of the rom to make it the exact file size. We don't need these useless bytes, and removing them will allow us to put more roms on the cart. Trimming does NOT affect the rom in any way so there's no risk of you removing important files from the game. Therefore you should always trim your roms to fit more stuff on your cart. GBATA will also tell you how much will be cut off after trimming. If you're using LittleWriter it will trim all roms automatically by default so basically you don't need to use GBATA first.