You're going to be waiting quite some time. His estimate was summer, months away. I hope you have some games to play until then.
Nah, gave up on him. I just got adventurous and did the mods myself. They were time consuming, but satisfying that I did it all myself. Still working on getting that S-video done, but I think I may head in a different direction for that.
Super Hucard is neat but less than perfect as I recall. Plus with only 256K of memory, many great games don't work. Sadly there was no update to utilize the additional memory in the arcade card.
Yeah, this was before I started doing any modding myself, and I would have been scared to try it out on my Turbo (not as cheap to replace as, say, my Sega Genesis). Congrats on successfully completing the mod!
I did my TG16 first since I was gonna attempt an A/V mod along side with the region mod. If anything, I didn't wanna risk f'ing up my PC-E Duo doing the region mod. The only thing I did bad was the hole for the switch; I made it too big. So I have a kinda big hole around that area. Otherwise, it works. Since I'm done with my CMVS project, I may work on either cleaning up my A/V and region mod on the TG16 or redoing my Sega Saturn region switch and updating it with s-video.
Sorry for the necroreply, I had a busy week. Obviously if Krikzz would have to include ROM and RAM it would be wasteful. I was under the impression that the System Cards were all ROM because the PCE/TG16 reads ROM at the same speed of its own RAM. Also, the System Cards load in Magic Engine like any other ROM, I assumed that was because they are all ROM.
Nope. If they were just BIOS ROMs there would have been no reason to have ever gone beyond version 2.X. 3.0 the Super CD-ROM standard brings the amount of RAM up to 256 kilobytes I believe. I think standard CD-ROM games only had 64 kilobytes to work with. The Arcade Card is a huge 2 megabytes or 2,048 kilobytes. Just by comparing CD, SCD, and ACD games you can see the difference this made for graphics.
There is a HUGE leap from Super CD to Arcade CD games. I am fairly confident that the Super CD's 256KB maxed out what the PCE could read on one chip, so the Arcade card is using bank switching to include all 16 Megabit of ROM space. I can't find where I read that at the moment and it isn't in the RE docs (PCE_Doc). Either way every discussion I have had about the Super System Card and the Arcade Card is that functions as RAM, because it is just as fast as RAM the PCE's RAM, but it is technically just ROM that the CD-ROM is filling up each load. Somewhat similarly, to the Genesis, the Sega CD is only a game cartridge that the Genesis can only "see" 256KB chunks every cycle. But the Sega CD actually has several banks of RAM adding up to 512 + 256 KB (768 KB). -edit- I admit I must have been wrong about the RAM in the Arcade Card being ROM, that doesn't appear to be anywhere. I must have just wondered if it was after learning of the speed of PCE HuCard ROM. -edit-edit- I had a random airhead moment in which I failed to even think about the definition of ROM while I was mixing up too much techno babble. I apologize for wasting everybody's time with my mindless assertion.
He's going to have to put most of the "brains" of the device on the top half of the card, where the label is, so it can stick out of the machine. The part which interfaces must be flat/thin.
If you want to see what it looks like, he did post a picture. http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/594/dsc0599k.jpg/ Looking at it again, I'm pretty sure if that is still the design there will be FlashROM, and it won't be trying to support the arcade card or cdrom cards.
The ram for SuperCD isn't 256k because the PCE has some single chip limiting thing. It is true that NEC seemed to reserve all hucard stuff to the lower 1megabyte address (with the exception of BOTH arcade cards), but that doesn't mean the hucard port can't address all 2megabytes of address space to the CPU - it can. Including all open bus areas not used by the CD base unit. The system card bios were all 256k in length (rom), so it was completely possible to have a 768k ram upgrade in addition to the original 64k CDRAM. So yes, the arcade card 2megabyte of ram (explicitly arcade card memory, not include any 3.0 ram upgrade on the Pro version) would need a bank switching mechanism. The SegaCD setup is *completely* different. Regardless if it has the word "bank switching" in the description. That was just an option to divide the 256k ram on the Genesis side into two 128k segments. The subcpu had to manually copy stuff to the off segment and swap it around. Nothing like any of the PCE setups. The arcade card went with 4 indirect auto incrementing signed 24bit read/write registers. And the signed auto incrementing is 16bit, not just 1 or 2 or 4. There's also a offset register that can be used in realtime or added/accumulated into the made register with a single port latch write. It's pretty complex compared to a simple bank switching setup and it's fairly nice too. The four address registers all have individual settings and can be individually setup for byte or word read/writes. There's also a special all port mode that spawns an entire 8k bank. There's four of them; once for each bank. It allows the CPU to use the Txx block transfer instructions and write to AC memory as if it were linearly mapped (albeit in 8k sections). Oh, it also has a 32bit register for 4bit signed barrel rolling or 4bit signed shifting (same reg, two different functions).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8BRbM52gpc Sad but true :Rock::Rock: I know it would take more effort and more money but I would think someone that goes for an Everdrive for any system would aim for an ultimate solution for everything that the system can offer. If the Turbo Everdrive cost 100 I'll buy it, if it cost 200 I'll buy it, if he's the ultimate solution for the turbo grafx/pc engine. I think that with most people would be the same, I might be mistaken.
Not to change the subject, but do you guys think the NES2PCE scene will be back again after this thing kicks off? I remember claims that almost all NES games could be "ported" to the PC Engine/TurboGrafx. I have a few of the ROMs and played them via emulator but it would be awesome to play the original Castlevania, Mega-Man and Super Mario Bros. on real hardware.
The games you mentioned plus Contra have been emulated on the PCE already. You just have to load the ROMs. This is not something for Krikzz to do. Alot of people have PC-Engine DUO systems which have CD drive built-in. You'll want to be sure EverDrive does not conflict with it. PCE EverDrive does not need to support loading CD BIOS. There is no good reason to support loading CD BIOS.
$200....that may be a tough sell for a lot of people, but who knows? I have been surprised. I didn't think I would sell ED64 very often at $175/ea. and I sold way more than I expected.
