hello, to be honest, while I do appreciate all the great games that we foreign games finally get to enjoy through Emulation, like the few missed Final Fantasys, the 3rd Mana game, the first Clock Tower, etc, to me, playing on a computer is not the same as playing it on a real system. I truly began to understand this when I bought bootlegs of Famicom games, Super Mario 2 (Lost Levels) and Earthbound Zero. It felt more natural than with any emu. Anyways, these people must have created these tapes somehow. So the question is, (in the lowest, stupidest computer terms possible) how would I go about doing a similar feat? Thanks (also, please forgive if this violates the TOS. Sorry)
well, making your own cart usually involves 'cannibalizing' an existing cartridge for that system. This means taking the cart apart and replacing the ROM chips. These ROM chips need to be of the proper type (they must have the same pinout and timings), and moreover they need to be programmed, ie the game data needs to be stored on them. This requires specific hardware, or, if you're feeling adventurous, it's also possible to use an old PC motherboard with flashbios to program the chips (I have some info on this if you want). So when you got your chip(s) programmed you need to desolder the existing chip(s) and solder the new one(s) in. However, this is not as easy as it might sound. For instance, if your cartridge circuit board looks like this: then you can pretty much forget about it. (the rom chips are 'glued' to the board with epoxy) Moreover, with several cart-based systems (ie the NES) there's the issue of mappers. A mapper is a dedicated chip that makes it possible for the console to read the cartridge. There's a lot of different incompatible mappers for the NES, so you'll need to pay attention to that, too. All in all, I'd say its not really worth the bother.
I thought it would be easy to make a home made cartridge, since on the Master System is not difficult (Omar from Smspower.org probably knows more about this)
Yes, it is possible to do it for the SNES/Mega Drive reasonably easily. I'm not going to explain it though... if you wanna figure it out, go and do it. Plenty of publically avaliable information out there that you have to put together. That said, I never actually made one (from what I her it's fiddly as it's an odd pinout)...
