I'll contribute to that, Mottzilla has given so much to the community here and many other forums, so why not eh.
if it came with the maintenance costs of a Ferrari nobody would have bought it, plus if you needed to replace little bits and parts once in a while that would suck. I had some issues with mine til I cleaned the contacts in my snes. some people blow on cartridges which are numb skulls. actually I acquired some carts from a guy who did that and didn't clean all of them promptly as I usually used to do when I made trips back from Funcoland (yeah that good store that gamestop literally destroyed and what do we have left now? a call of duty store. bleh). Well I'm still working on this stuff but I'm busy til next week. I got a cd based copier I need to repair and I have to get more parts for that SA-1. I got the donor cart and the ZIF socket already and my custom boards are on order so all that is left is getting the programmer and a few other parts for the programmer. SD2SNES is the best yes, I had forgotten that it loads games nearly immediately which is the top reason to own this thing. I have a few other snes flash carts too but when you own this you don't really need them, although the ufo one had some features that the sd2snes lacks I think cheat code support and something else I forgot possibly RTS or something. I actually never unboxed my ufo... I paid too much for it.
The lack of cheat code support is what I notice most because it's the only thing that other carts do that the SD2SNES doesn't. It's the one area in which it doesn't match or exceed the competition. But that being said, the Cx4 alone makes the SD2SNES far superior to everything else on the market. That's actually what convinced me to buy this one after having passed on all the rest. I don't care if it's only two games and I can play the originals. A flash cart that doesn't support every Mega Man game is just not worth it to me.
While I get why SuperFX support is very hard to program and most likely won't happen anytime soon, I still don't understand why there hasn't been any other sort of upgrades to improve on the SD2SNES since last year?
Because the project was more of an hobby for Ikari than anything else and afaik he's got a baby on the way or just born. He open sourced the whole code so go ahead and update to your liking. [btw: I know how you feel, I'm just stating the facts that I am aware off, assuming the baby is just born Ikari got the news around 8 months ago and after a much needed "holy crap" moment he may have had to turn his life around, like prepare a room for the baby and all that comes with it]
What improvements can be made though? Obviously the FPGA has the potential to simulate additional hardware, but what other things are you wanting to see improved? Eventually a product doesn't have much that can be improved via software updates.
Pretty much the only thing missing in the sd2snes is game genie support compare to the other flashcarts. And is there a way to change the wallpaper?
People are still holding out for Super FX support in this device but since the creator of this has a newborn now, that isn't likely to ever happen at this pace. Still, there are other people that work on other projects and continue theirs so maybe this is just a short term stumble along the way to more features who knows. There hasn't been any updates to sd2snes web site in more than half a year so there's really no telling what is going on.
And the last real update was over a year ago now. I had really hoped to at least see some Game Genie support, even the PowerPak was capable of that.
Last night while I was playing Donkey Kong Country i've noticed some audio problems on the SD2Snes that it's not present on the original cartridge. Tried to clean it up with isopropyl alcohol with no success. The audio situation I'm describing is missing a few notes and sounds on the game. Could this be caused by dirty contacts? Or even could the SD2Snes have any problem emulating the sound area of a few games?
SD2SNES doesn't "emulate" anything on a standard cartridge like Donkey Kong Country. Your sound problems are caused by something else. It could be caused by the SD2SNES having a bad contact or bad memory. If you can record a video with clear sound it would be easier to figure out. Also remember there are atleast 2 different versions of the game, so some differences in sound may exist between them.
Right, I'm talking ones labeled v1.0, v1.1, and v1.2. It's possible certain changes to sound and music were made. But it could still be some strange problem you are having. But I'd suspect many other games to exhibit problems too.
Sorry my post is a little bit misleading, I should have thought about that before posting. I was referring to the most recent upload here. http://sd2snes.de/files/?C=M;O=D
Very interesting, seems to be uploaded December 8th. I might just have to try it out.... This is on his blog posted oct 12 2012..I wonder if its related?
Ikari wrote that he expected the next update before the EOY, and that's where we're at now. Given that he didn't release this publicly yet, I'll hold off.
