A few quick questions about the PS1 flashable Unirom

I have been looking into the Unirom thing, and I figured if I can manage to find a Gameshark cheap it would be a nice thing to have until I can mod my system, I have a few questions about it though:

1. I heard that there is a version that is just the NoCash part which will boot whatever disk is in the drive? Is there such a thing since I don't want to go through the menu every time?

2. If not, is there by chance a version that also has GameShark/Action Replay features in it? I figured it would be a bit of a shame to lose the GameShark features to flash this on it.

3. Do any versions sense the on/off switch at all and do anything with it? Preferably disabling the device when the switch is off.

4. Likewise, do any versions of the firmware contain any sort of tools to run a PAL game in NTSC? Or would I have to rip the disk and burn a patched ISO for that?

5. If there is a version with all these features, I assume this means I would need one of the larger devices to flash it on? Is there any list or way of knowing how large the EEPROM of a device would be before I buy it so I know what to look for if I need a larger one?

6. I have a cart from long ago that did something similar to Unirom, however, it required me to have an original disk in the PS1 first and use a spring to hold the door button down, it would stop spinning the disk for me to make the swap trivial, but it was still an annoyance. Does the Unirom also need you to do this, or can it just boot without any swapping at all?

7. I have an old Pentium 3 with both a standard Parallel port and the proprietary Parallel port that you could only get with an ISA Comms Card that was intended for these devices. Is there any way to flash them through the parallel port instead of using a disk in a PS1?

8. And finally, if not, would it work if I swapped devices after booting the flasher disk? As I mentioned, I do have a very old cartridge that does something similar, but it obviously would require me to plug the cart in first, and I don't want to flash that one. Would I be able to use that to boot the disk, then swap devices and flash the other one? Or could that cause issues and/or damage swapping the parallel devices while the PS1 is powered on?

 

1. I don't think any version of Unirom just does the Secret Unlock and Boot.
2. If you want to use GameShark cheats you could first boot the GameShark Lite CD and then your intended game.
3. Not sure.
4. I don't think so, but Unirom supports plugins. I think generally to do PAL/NTSC interchanging you need to patch the game program after loading it but before executing it. GameShark codes might achieve this.
5. I don't think so.
6. I have a similar cartridge and it's basically an Action Replay clone which has a feature to stop the CD motor so you can do a disc swap. Unirom supports this too, but on North American consoles you can use the Nocash Secret Unlock instead.
7. Depends on the cheat cartridge you have. My AR clone I think doesn't even have a EEPROM in it, I think it's OTP. You could always swap the ROM chip on the cheat cart if you wanted.
8. Nocash says you can hotswap Cheat carts Ok. So you can use one to boot a CD-R to run the installer on another cheat cart.

I haven't tried it yet, but Nocash made an "Expansion ROM" version of his own PS BIOS Clone. So you could potentially install that on a Cheat Cartridge and it features the same unlocking capability as Unirom.

 

I use unirom on my xplorer and have no real issues, but the warning screen on the later versions is a bit annoying and it doesn't work with all games I believe.

I would go with an xplorer cart if you can, then you can use catflap easily to communicate with it using caetla.