I can´t wair for that !!! Can you tell us something about the turbografxeverdrive ??? I need one !!!!!! ;-)
What is there to tell? It will likely be similar in features and cost to the original EverDrive MD from what has been said. It'll take SD cards and have FlashROM most likely and you can play most PC-Engine/Turbografx HuCard games. He said it won't likely be available until summer 2012.
I was looking at my Hu-cards the other day and realized there's no way to open em - Any ideas on how to get the bare pcb into a decent shell?
Most likely there won't be and I doubt it will sell well enough to justify getting custom plastic molds and shells made. We have a few ideas of what we might do for Deluxe Edition, but we will need to experiment a bit.
Like most PC Engine/TG16 flashcards available currently, this one may be a just a bare PCB. On the actual HuCard, the actual game PCB is in the black area with the contacts, except for larger meg games like SFII'. Based on what was shown with KRIKzz's PCB plans, I'm thinking that this will be just a straight up PCB. There may be a possibility to use larger meg games as the shell, but again, it's all in KRIKzz's design. Really not much you can do with this since a HuCard is pretty much just a thin card. ...wait, looking at my SFII' card, it might be possible. KRIKzz, think you could look into it?
There is no point in destroying perfectly good HuCards. The bare PCB could be covered if desired by other methods.
Yeah SFII is not super common like Madden for N64 or the slew of sports games for the Genesis. Even if he could make it fit in there I wouldn't want to see a bunch of SFII destroyed for this purpose.
I don't mind if it is just a PCB. All Krikkz's stuff is just PCB, it's everyone else who adds casings to them. With the PCE/TurboGrafx, PCB would be plenty convenient. With something like the Mega Drive, it actually helps to have a cartridge casing as inserting and removing the raw PCB is a pain on systems like that.
I'd like a hu-card case myself, so here's hoping for a thinner PCB and micro SD. Possibly mounted on the bottom side (over the finger space).
usually micro sd cards it is class 2, but class 6 or 10 not a problem also. but anyway class 2 is more fast than flash burning speed.
We could always just modify a HuCard sleeve to cover the chips on the *ahem* Turbo Everdrive PCB. Also, DUO/Rs have a card slot cover, so as long as the ED board isn't too long it would stay covered anyway. Since you should be able to load the Super CD-ROM bios from the ED there would practically be no reason to ever remove it. I like to play the games I own in their actual form though.
The ED would not likely support the Super CD-ROM BIOS as it would have to contain RAM like the actual HuCard does. This is the same reason the ED won't support the Arcade Card. Unless ofcourse he does use RAM. But Flash is cheaper and more likely.
The ED64 uses ram, if I'm not mistaken, so I don't see why the Turbo Everdrive couldn't, and by your explanation I hope it does.
The ED64 is quite different. For one I believe that Cartridge EEPROM, SRAM, and FlashRAM is probably held in the SDRAM that also holds the loaded ROM. But on the PC-Engine, hardly any HuCards contain RAM. And most games are not very large. The largest I think is 20 megabits and that is Street Fighter II'. The only reason to add RAM would be to support CD-ROM bios loading which would add cost to the PCE ED that is pretty unnecessary. Neither the Super CD or Arcade CD cards are expensive enough to make that make sense. Eventually he will tell us the details on the PCE ED. It's just my guess and opinion that it would be flash based like the ED MD. And that it would not support CD BIOS loading.
The deal with the CD-ROM cards as I understand it is this. The PCE sees and accesses ROM at the same speed as its own RAM. So, whatever compatible ROM Krikzz uses should also load the CD-ROM bios as long as the PCB has enough ROM to include the amount expected (up to 2MB).
You are confused or missing the point. Krikzz said it will be priced similar to the EverDrive MD. This suggests the cartridge will load ROM images into FlashROM. The CD-ROM BIOS cards contain both a small BIOS ROM and also RAM. FlashROM is not RAM, you cannot use it. The only way you could support loading the Super CD or Arcade CD BIOS would be if you use RAM and not FlashROM. If RAM was used, you would still need a small BIOS ROM so it makes more sense that it would just be a larger FlashROM to store both the BIOS and the loaded game. The largest PCE game is 8 Megabits except for Street Fighter 2 CE' which is cheap and easy to get. The Arcade CD has 16 Megabits of RAM as I recall. Including that much RAM just for the Arcade card would be silly. I would guess the PCE ED will have enough FlashROM for Street Fighter 2 CE' just because Flash is cheap. But really it's all speculation, only Krikzz knows. I'm just telling you based off what I've read I don't think you should expect CD BIOS support nor do I think that is a good idea. Waste of resources.
If one were buying a system in the TG-16/PCE family, and planning to use the EverDrive pretty much exclusively (along with CD-ROMs), which hardware combination offers the best balance between cost, reliability, and compatibility/support for the largest possible % of games? Since I have zero hands-on experience with TG-16 hardware, all this stuff about arcade cards and so forth makes my head swim. It'd be nice to know if there's a single console that, with a flashcart's help, supports almost everything (except the Supergrafx games, presumably) and doesn't cost a mint. But maybe it's like the proverbial smart/hot/not crazy trifecta: you can only have two out of three.
