I don't know if anyone else did this, but when Nintendo packaged Tetris with the Gameboy, they did something interesting with the gamepak. When we talk of 'chips' we usually think of DIL or QUAD packages made of plastic/ceramic with the actual silicon somewhere inside. Well, some time ago I decided to take a look-see at the internals of the Tetris Gamepak. What do you know. No packaging. A sliver of silicon on a blob of glue with lines leading to the usual legs of the package. I was impressed by their attention to cost-cutting, I can tell you! Now, and I ask this with no preconcieved notions, can a cheaper DS gamepak be produced? I have a game design that will fit (sound and all) into 256K. I know that no official gamepak is so small which is why I intend to pitch the game to Nintendo themselves (I've done this before so I know who to talk to). Input, anyone?
Super Mario Bros / duck hunt and other nes cart have this type pakage for rom. I think it's cheaper pakage for game with a very large module of game made just like tetris or mario bros but for normal game I think it would be more expensive cause you loose the flexibility to use manufacturing process of all other game, pcb assembly chain must be different in some way.
Oh, I fully agree that it's only money saving if your making million upon million. I didn't know about the NES titles; it shows it's more common than I thought. I am working on a Mario themed game (or, hopefully so) and the whole thing will fit into 256K, SFX and music included. The only fly in the ointment is that I need to have some memory to save user-designed levels. I'm still wondering if the whole thing could be put on sn EEPROM (can you clear & write just certain bits? Is there a cheap way to produce such abn item... Help & advice much appreciated. Thanks, P-)
If your making a gb or gbc game you can easily make a cart with flash with an orrginal cartridge: http://www.reinerziegler.de/readplus.htm#GB_Flasher
Just curious, why would you need to produce a cart to pitch it to Nintendo? I'm sure if you sent them the code they could just run it on their dev hardware. Or if you sent them the compiled ROM they could certainly put it on a cart themselves/run in an emulator, etc.
I want to have the thing packed into 256K so Nintendo will seriously think of all that extra profit. Of course, since the whole thing fits in RAN, radical solutions such as a 1K boot-strap with a serial (1-bit) ROM would be possible, but a LOT of effort.
