Place your Bets! Guess what the next Everdrive will be....

i wonder, any of pcengine games have a save ability?

 

New project, Krikzz?

 

Mother of God....

 

i just asking

 

I'm not an expert but I would think most or all games that save use Ten no Koe, or if a Duo, the internal memory to do so.

There isn't much room on those cards seeing as it's only the black part which has any function. I don't think you would need to support saving, which I imagine makes everything much easier.

 

Well, this put a smile on my face.

I didn't think that any card games allowed for saves, but according to Wikipedia, they did. They did not save the games on the card, though, and required the use of an add-on like the CD unit or the Turbo Booster Plus, at least in the U.S. I don't know if any PC Engine games actually saved to the card.

 

The only game I'm aware of with saving (not a password) was Populous. I'm not sure if the memory was in the card or not. But 99% of the HuCards I think are just a plain ROM with nothing special going on. The largest game is Street Fighter II' at something like 20 Megabits. It has some kind of memory mapper. The game is also very cheap and probably not worth the trouble of supporting. But typically games are 8 Megabits or smaller.

Update: Actually it seems that no HuCard contains any SRAM, they are all just fancy containers for ROM chips. http://archives.tg-16.com/turbo_play_0010.htm#more

Any game that uses any SRAM for saving uses what is built into the console. HuCards contain only ROM except for the CDROM System cards and Street Fighter II'.

 

The last version of the NEO PCE card has save ability on the hue card (supported by battery) so there must be games that have memory for saving.

OMG... my dream might come trueeeeeeee

 

It was. The card was noticeably thicker as well. Also, the cover at the right bottom corner, and the card itself were marked with the "RAMROM HuCARD" logo. See the pictures below [click to enlarge].

P.S. - People seem to be jumping up and down with excitement at the thought of a PC Engine flash card from Krikzz, but these have been around for ages. ToToTek was selling those long ass PCBs for years, and Neo Flash guys made not one, but three different cards: 64Mbit, 128Mbit and a 128Mbit with save support [this one I actually bought - aside from an old ToToTek one, but owning Populous, I've never tested the save feature]. I'd much rather see Krikzz have a go at WonderSwan, since pretty much everything else has been covered, but he's already stated that he's not interested. Oh well.
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The Tototek card is no longer available (at least, every time I've checked the site, it is sold out), and I have heard that there are problems with the Neo card. Aside from that, based upon what Igor has done with the Everdrives so far, I think his card could end up being superior to either of these, if just for the likelihood that his will use an SD card, allowing for multiple games to be stored and loaded.

 

Myself I have a NeoPCE card that I find it has inadequate storage space, nothing like an SD solution Krikzz would make.
I also find it difficult to load with games because of the need of buggy software, weird behaving USB flashing controller and a great deal of incompatibilities with the recent PC operating systems (Vista, Windows7). Every time you want to flash a game, you need to flash the entire rom content all over again. And don't get me started on the ROM bad sectors issue...
Tototek's solution is more or less the same as Neo's, I don't know about bad sectors on this one though, quality might be better I don't know but it's still much of a fuss to use.

Having the NeoPCE cart doesnt mean that i wouldnt get Krikzz's if he were to make one. I would buy it in a second thus rendering my NEO card obsolete.

 

I got it years ago. Back then interest seemed to be very small, which was good I guess, thinking of small quantities of produced PCBs.

The ToToTek design was much more reliable, that's for sure. It was ugly as hell, though - exposed guts and everything. The Neo card has the tendency of freezing some games, and has some issues with images that have been region converted [which seem to run fine on ToToTek's card].

I buy both TurboGrafx and PC Engine games, but I'm usually playing on the PC Engine, since the majority of the games I own are Japanese. I don't have the pinout converter, so I use the flash card to play the TurboGrafx titles on the PC Engine.

You're probably right. Still, I'd rather see something new for a console that is still to get a modern flash device. That's why WonderSwan immediately came to mind. WonderMagic is impossible to obtain, and even if you track one down, the interface is outdated. Same goes for WonderWitch, which is expensive and doesn't run commercial images at all. A flash cartridge capable of running both WW and commercial images would be awesome, but I'm well aware that it's not happening. Ever.

You've got 128Mbit on the Neo card. That's 16 meg. There's only one 20Mbit game, so you can still stick a couple of titles in there. People are spoiled these days, I tell you. They want whole romsets on one cartridge. Where's the joy of constantly re-flashing the damn thing? Haha.

 

When I first bought a batch of Neo hardware, I also found the software very awkward, not to mention the proprietary storage medium [an NDS slot-2 cartridge]. There's an SD adapter for everything but the PCE card, though - for obvious reasons.

I'm on XP and I'm using Neo2 Pro Manager v 1.11. I can't complain really. There's no need for me to re-flash the whole thing, either. Maybe upgrade to newer client?

And like I said, the ToToTek card was, and still is, much more reliable. I'm generally pleased with most of the ToToTek products, even though they did live in the past when developing the MegaCart, which I also bought.

Hell, I'd probably buy it too, if only to add it to my collection [or switch over, were it to prove vastly superior to Neo]. If Krikzz does make one, I hope he'll go in the Neo direction when it comes to the looks of the board. It's not like you can just get a cartridge case for these, and exposed boards are so 2001.

P.S. - Still think he should do WonderSwan.

 

I have the first 128M NeoPCE card (without the save memory) and the current flashing software (which was released like ages ago) recognises it only as a 64M (other owners of the same cart report the same) so im stuck with some ancient version of the flasher that works. Not to mention that the USB driver has huuuge problems on systems other than XP, it doesn't work correctly in XP compatibility mode on Windows 7 either.

So I need to have access on a system with real XP... if that isn't a major problem nowdays then what is....

There really is a great need for something better.... PCE is such a great hardware, its a pitty not to have a decent flash cart solution.

 

Does the new flasher have some functionality that you're missing from the old one? At first, I was using the old flasher as well, but when I updated to the new cartridge menus, I switched over to the new one.

Have you tried installing Windows XP under VMware? Virtualizing an entire OS for the sake of a flasher might feel like an overkill, but if were to fix your compatibility problems, I'd go for it.

I'm fine with what's out there at the moment. When I try to test something and it doesn't work on Neo, it usually works on ToToTek's card. If it doesn't work on either, it's most likely broken [I mean homebrew]. Using a flash card with games in my case is mostly for convenience, and it works. Also, my 128Mbit card with save support detects fine.

I must be too old to mind all the problems with flash devices. Issues with Neo are nothing compared to all the problems you had to face when using Wildcards, Doctors, etc.

 

No there isn't any other functionality that im missing. The problem has been discussed on the Neo forum. The problem with the flasher program is that its not written specially for the Neo products. Its a general program and closed sourse so theres mot mush they can do about many of the bugs that have been reported.

To make the long story short, Neo products have problems, VERY little support and low quality of components. Thats hardly a satisfactory solution for the PCE.

 

They do have problems, I won't argue with you there. In fact, if it wasn't for dedicated coders like Conle and ChillyWilly, Neo products would be done, since they so heavily depend on those menus.

This reminds me. Has anyone tested the Everdrive MD with a WonderMega [preferably the Sega model]? It's what I use for all my MD / Genesis games. MegaCart works fine, bios swap feature and all, but Neo MD cartridge doesn't. It boots to the menu, loads the chosen image and then either blanks out the screen or returns to the menu. It works just fine on the MD / MD2, though.

You were unlucky with the buggy Neo card, so I fully understand where you're coming from. Like I said, if Krikzz does make a new PCE device, I'll probably end up getting it anyway.

 

Well Im no expert but from what other people have said, it must be relatively easy to make a pce cart. The hard part would be to make it thin enough and pretty but even if it wasn't pretty I would still buy it as long as it can play the games and store them in SD.

 

Thin enough for what? I would agree making it look nice might be a challenge. I think it would be preferable for any new device to not be much bigger than a HuCard if not the same footprint. I hope this hint does lead to a EverDrive for PCE. Great system, lots of good games on HuCard.

 

derekb, nice to see you around still.
I agree Gameboy. Id be interested in that.