I'll transfer the total price + shipping, can anyone forward the 512mb bundle to Greece? The retrousb guy's afraid of Leonidas or something.
I am, actually. Please do Oops, sorry I didn't notice the age of your post... *points to custom title*
Hey Anti, I don't mind The old Game Genie has a comparator which compares a register (containing the address part of the cheat code) to the address bus; when it detects a match, forces the ROM to be disabled and outputs the data part of the code on the data bus. It doesn't affect the actual game speed because it's all in hardware and the cheats are applied faster than the console can access the ROM. Action Replay/Game Shark cheats on the other hand are stored in RAM and can be applied solely by software. What the AR BIOS does is take a master code (containing the address of free RAM to install a cheat kernal) and hooks into Vblank (trying to remember how.) At Vblank control goes to the cheat kernal which then applies the cheats (many cheats are allowed because they're stored in RAM instead of hardware registers) then jumps to the normal Vblank handler after the cheats are applied. This method requires a fast console where timing isn't too critical since clock cycles are lost applying the cheats every 50/60hz. This is like the new GBA/DS flash cards which don't actually have EEPROM and battery backed SRAM etc and have real time save support. Before the games are started they're patched, accesses made to EEPROM or SRAM are hooked by a save emulation routine which dumps the changed data back to the storage flashcard file. Real time save works by hijacking Vblank, checking for a button (or hotkeys) then calling that routine. When GBA flash cards make the game have slowdown that's not normally there, it's because the Vblank handler is spilling into the next frame.
Well I ordered mine. I'm glad I was able to before it goes out of stock again. Also I read that there was a bootrom and mapper update which is said to fix various bootrom issues like the stack pointer thing and the MMC3 IRQs. Can't wait to see it in person.
This update will fix a number of issues I mentioned in my previous post. It's still too bad that the PowerPak can't be upgraded without a CopyNES though.
PowerPak out of stock again... Hope all AG members who have been waiting for PowerPaks got one this time. I also hope bunnyboy makes another batch and that kevtris also makes another batch of CopyNES PCBs for those who want that... CF
I was surprised when I heard that the CopyNES wasn't being made anymore. Although it too is a pricey item, it still can work for development with the PowerPak Lite, and you could hack up any old cartridge I imagine and change ROM for RAM. I guess it's really small niche product. I just hope the BootROM never needs another update.
Well.. in some interview with bunnyboy he said that he's considering making a new CopyNES with USB connectivity iirc.
I got my PowerPAK today. It took me quite awhile to load up all the files I wanted on the card. It doesn't support some of the fancy/pirate mappers yet but all the regular NES titles seem to work perfect. I'm quite pleased so far. I started out by trying out odd pirate games that used MMC3 or were hacked to use it. It was funny playing "Sonic 3D Blast 5" on my NES. I ended with homebrew stuff. First, Sack of Flour that was made in NBasic. It had slowdown which was noticable, and more importantly, any time it uploaded tiles to vram or really did just about anything it seemed to corrupt the graphics. Clearly he didn't realze how important it is not to write outside vblank. Anyway the game is just about unplayable cause of that shit. Last I tried my own NES demo I coded. It works perfectly. =) Until I pressed reset and realized that VBlank doesn't happen on reset and it corrupted my graphics most of the time I pressed reset. But I fixed it. :O
