Hey KRIKzz, the EverDrive is saving me a lot of time for testing and development on the Mega Drive, but I'm finding there's one thing that I keep on having to go back to the ToToTEK cart for every now and then. With the ToToTEK cart, if I burn just a single game to the cart, that game boots directly and immediately when the system starts, with no menu code or anything else running. This has been essential when I've run tests to determine the initial state of the Mega Drive hardware on power-on (on non-TMSS systems), as I know nothing else has messed with the system state before my code runs. With the EverDrive though, I can't do this, because the EverDrive menu always comes up when the system is first powered on. Along the same lines, I'm going to want to use a flashcart at some point in the Sega Pico. I can make the ToToTEK cart work on this system since it boots to my code directly, but since a few things work differently, the EverDrive won't be able to run its boot menu, so I won't be able to use it. I'm guessing that short of adding a hardware switch to the cart, there's no real way to provide a direct-boot capability with the EverDrive (since, of course, as the flashing happens in the menu, if you can't get to the menu you can't reflash), but I was wondering if you could make a change to the firmware on the next revision to provide a shortcut to booting the currently flashed game. Something like, say, if A+B+C are being held down on the first controller at boot time, your cart immediately cuts over to flash memory, in particular without touching the VDP. No TMSS checks or anything (don't need it if you're not using VDP), no clearing any memory or initializing devices, just boot from flash as soon as possible. This won't solve the Pico problem, but I'll settle for being able to get "close enough" to no menu code running on the Mega Drive. Is this something you'd be able to do?
This would also be useful for people who want to make their own single game carts (e.g. of an unreleased game) but don't have the skills to modify carts. There would need to be some kind of override in case though, of course.
just turn on hard reset option, and it will force full hardware clean. state after hard reset equal to state after cold start. for your suggestion need bootcode update, not firmware, and i should exec some my code in any case, cuz only cpu have acces to joypad, for check if hot key combnation is pressed or not. but i don't want to allow to update bootloader, cuz any error while bootcode update = dead cart
