I'm looking at making some flash carts for my older systems, mainly the 16bit era. I was just wondering if anyone here has experience in this field, or knows of any great online resource/forums for this type of activity. The best I've found so far is this page, which should be enough for me to get some things built. But more info can never hurt, right? http://www.romlab.prv.pl/
What system do you have in mind? FlashCarts for Genesis/MegaDrive and SNES and PC-Engine already exist, not sure what else you could want. www.tototek.com Making your own would involve alot more time and money to make basically the same thing.
hmm. I know about tototek, but I figured it would be cheaper to make my own - especially for the genesis and tg16. Aren't EPROMs dirt cheap nowadays?
What about the Megacart or whatever it was? There was an announcement in the General Gaming forum some months ago. Looked like a very solid product.
MegaCart can be found on the mainnews page of tototek or at http://www.genny4ever.net/ EPROMs aren't dirt cheap. Infact finding the right EPROMs can be quite a hunt and can be pricey. I didn't know this awhile back but these EPROMs weren't hugely popular chips or anything and some models are very hard to find. Now it's not very hard to find suitable/fast enough flashrom memory but it's still not super easy to make a flashable cartridge. With EPROMs you just need to program it and then connect it to the right solder pads or put it into a socket. With FlashROMs, you could do that too but you would have to remove the chip to reprogram it which I don't think you want to do. For PC-Engine, you'll just have to bite the bullet. Getting ahold of another similar device would probably be pretty hard. I mean you might be able to just hack up a HuCard and wire up an EPROM, I don't know though. For Genesis the MegaCart is only about 70$ shipped. The cost of buying an EPROM programmer and the EPROMs you need just isn't worth it. The Flash products such as the MDPRO64mbit or MegaCart or the PCE are superior to anything you would make anytime soon. There really isn't any way to get it done cheaper and get the same quality. Just buy the MegaCart or Tototek's MegaDrive cartridge and Tototek's PCE device. It may seem like alot of money but making your own will only end up costing you just as much if not more and you'll have an inferior device.
http://raphnet.net/electronique/genesis_cart/genesis_cart_en.php Simple Gensis flash cart. Catch: you need a flash eeprom programmer.
SMSPower has a guide on building your own dumper and in turn how to turn a cart into a reprogrammable model. Now that I think about it I don't recall the guide mentioning chip replacement, wonder if that means the SMS carts were reflashable from the get go.
They aren't. The SMSPower model uses battery backed SRAM and requires the "dumper" to use as a programmer. This is less easy with MD because of the 16-bit data bus which means more wires and much more logic. If you use Flash instead of SRAM, using counter chips for addressing like SMSReader will be really slow.
