Topic: need help finding the right gameboy advance

So I know pretty much nothing about anything, so sorry if this is really stupid of me to ask. I’m a huge Pokémon fan, and do a lot of shiny hunting. I want to transfer some of my shiny Pokémon between gameboy advance cartridges (ruby, sapphire etc) but only have ds lites. From what I understand, you can only trade between two gameboy advances with a link cable thing. I was wondering if anyone knows the cheapest gameboys I could get for this one purpose? They don’t need to be legit or anything, just capable of trading Pokémon and preferably available in Australia

I would assume original GBAs would be the cheapest since they are the relatively least desired model of GBA.
Really, it's a choice between GBA or SP (or the GameCube Game Boy Player, but that would be the most expensive )

@KingMike ah, thanks so much! Another quick question if you don’t mind, but if I was to get game boys from two different regions, would they be able to play games from regions other than their own, and trade with the other?

@FluffyTheropod Game Boy Advance is not region locked there would be no issues there. Region locking handheld consoles began with DSi and ended with 2DS.

And Pokemon actually rewards you for trading between regions. If you like shiny hunting, breeding Pokemon from different regions increases your chances of hatching a shiny Pokemon. It's what's called the "Masuda Method" after the guy who (actually I don't remember if he programmed it, or just revealed it)

I think communication between Japanese and localized Gen 3 Pokemon games is not fully compatible.

Gen 1 and 2 Japanese games were incompatible with any other launguage (due to the Pokemon and consequently the entire save data format, not being designed with localization in mind. So Iwata had to recode the data formatting for western release. I've heard that even the Korean versions of Gen 2, despite visually resembling the Japanese versions, had formatting more consistent with the western versions.)

Gen 3 I heard was just compatible enough between Japanese and localization that they could connect without breaking. But names would at least become corrupted.
It was not until Gen 4 (the first with online support) that they had international compatibility in mind when developing the games.

@Heavyarms55 okay, that’s what I thought! I do use the Masuda method quite often in newer games, but I didn’t think it was a thing before gen 6. Thanks for the help!

@KingMike ah, alright. Thanks so much for the help!

@FluffyTheropod I may be wrong, but I believe 3rd gen, the GBA era, was when it was first possible to trade internationally. I don't think you could do so in the Game Boy era because the games didn't support the font and alphabet for other regions.

@Heavyarms55 The data format was different in Gen 1, as it only allowed 5-character Pokemon and trainer names in Japanese. They probably considered that would've been too short to create memorable (and marketable) names in English, so they had to raise them to 10 and 7, which meant changing the data. (yes, on computers and newer consoles they often use 2-byte Japanese encodings and 1-byte English which probably allowed newer games to support both Japanese and European languages without size issues (2 bytes could be one Japanese character or two European). But on 8-bit consoles like the original GB, they typically only used 1 byte encoding.)
As a consequence, the Pokemon Box size had to be reduced from 30 to 20 internationally (as one box was about as much as could fit in the original GB console's RAM (8 KB) without needing to swap data with the save file.) Though the number of Boxes was increased to make it an approximately equal total. Maybe localizations gained an additional 10 slots total.
Trivia: In playing the Japanese and English Gen 1 games next to each other, I found the Safari Zone tutorial text had to add a warning (not present in Japanese) for the localized version to recommend players choose a new PC Box first since the smaller limit meant they'd be more likely to reach it catching.

Since Gen 2 was designed to be backwards compatible with Gen 1, that meant Japanese and localized versions each had to retain data limits with their predecessors. (that included that Gold and Silver were also designed to be compatible with the original monochrome GB)

@KingMike Ah so that was the reasoning. It's not surprising though, very few words in Japanese take more than 5 characters. Because most Japanese characters are two sounds, both a consonant and a vowel. And Kanji can be even more because unlike hiragana and katakana, Kanji represents a meaning, not a sound. Take: 日曜日 Japanese for Sunday. Written in 3 Kanji. But if you were to write in our alphabet: nichiyoubi.

Sorry I'm kind of a nerd on this topic. I've lived in Japan for 5 years and am always learning new things in the language.

@FluffyTheropod The original GBAs have pretty awful screens (no lighting, you need to be in the sun/ directly under a lamp), and they are quite expensive to replace with a backlit one. If you are not comfortable modding, I would suggest getting a newer one. The cost will be slightly lower overall.

GBAs themselves are region free, and as a fellow Australian, I would say that importing one online may actually be cheaper, make sure you check out that option.