Morning all. As I mentioned in my welcome thread, I want to start playing around in the weird and wonderful world of reproduction cartridges, mainly for english patched, unreleased or homebrew software. I did think about starting off with StarFox 2, but decided something easier might be a better idea. That led me to Master System carts. They look a lot easier, but I do have some questions. I've already got a solder station, flux, desolder braid and pump, spare tips and a multimeter. Obviously I need an EPROM programmer and eraser. Any recommendations on the programmer? I'm aiming for under £50 if possible (about US$75). As for donor carts, I know I need a cart with the correct sized ROM for a donor.... so 32k for 32k, 128k for 128k, etc. What i'm wondering is, would a smaller game work on a larger cart? 32k on a 128k donor for example. This might seem stupid to do, but I was offered a few Sonic 1, cart only games for cheap since the used retro store has tons of them! Thanks for any replies.
Just as a small update, I was given two 32kb carts for free today. Any chance of them being used with larger eproms?
I think the real challenge will be finding/creating paging chips to go beyond the 32kb barrier: http://www.smspower.org/Development/SMSPagingChips I'd be interested to hear how you handle that!
Also I don't see why a smaller game (especially a 32kb one that didn't do ANY paging) wouldn't work, as long as it wasn't writing to the bank switch addresses $FFFC - $FFFF. EDIT: You might have to twiddle with checksums or the ROM footer which inform the game of how large a cart to expect, but AFAIK if the footer tells the machine that it's a 32K ROM, it'll only checksum the lower 32K. There's also a setting for a 48K ROM, but I think only some of the weird Korean carts use that.
Right, so the 32k carts are only good for 32k games. That's fine. I can use them as tester carts to ensure I program eproms correctly. It looks like I need to source carts with only 1 ROM in them and a mapper chip, as it sounds like the chip handles everything for carts bigger than 32k and up to 4mbit. Thanks for that link. I need to learn more about memory mapping and addresses, but its helped!
I've been thinking about doing the same actually and almost bought all the stuff to make a flasher cart as on SMSPower. How have you gone on with this so far?
