I was wondering if anyone would recomend using one of these to introduce myself into tinkering with the MD. Are there any better alternatives? Has anyone ever bought anything from Tototek? Any problems? I'll be grateful for any advice. Cheers
Tototek is excellent. You could buy the MD64PRO by Tototek that has the parallel port cart programmer. Or you could buy the MegaCart ( http://products.genny4ever.net/ ) which can be programmed by the same cart programmer, or by your Sega CD add-on with a CD-R containing ROMs. The MD64PRO does all cart games by Virtua Racing. The MegaCart is intended for playing import Sega CD games but it can also play ROMs up to 3 megabytes in size, as long as they don't require saving. Alternatively to those you could build your own Flash cart with any Flash memory and make your own Genesis Cartridge to DIP adapter to then program the cartridge with an EPROM programmer.
That's a shame, do you know him? I'd quite like to contact him direct to see if he can point me in the right direction as to obtaining one. Failing that has anyone seen any easy to follow guides as to making and loading code onto a flash cart out there?
Tomy is still adding items to the new store, eventually all items in stock will be available, gotta just wait or order from the old store (which still should work). If you want to start "tinkering" immediately though, start with an emulator then build your own EPROM/Flash/what have you cart or build a PC link: http://www.retrodev.com/transfer.html
I think the emulator suggestion is very practical, but I think people find it less exciting than their creation running on a real MD. The thing is though if you want fast cycle time you're going to need a MD backup unit with a parallel transfer feature as a Flash cart is not ideal for rapid development testing.
Emulation saves a great deal of time when it comes to debugging your code... to me, being able to test my stuff on real HW is a must have. There are plenty of things that do not work on real hw but do on emulators, and people happen to try them out quite often :/ bit of advice : don't use BTST or CLR on VDP ToToTek does great stuff, Megacart is extremely great piece of HW and is worth every cent it costs. For dev I use my own cart+programmer/dumper though : http://www.hot.ee/tmeeco/EEPROM/INACT.JPG http://www.hot.ee/tmeeco/EEPROM/INACT2.JPG (This is pain to make, if you want one, you need lot of cash ). Its multipurpose, and I use it to burn flash and EPROM chips of any kind (as long as they're 5V tolerant).
The NES and somewhat with the SNES were both victim of hackers and homebrew developers making their stuff on emulators and not testing on real hardware leaving us with a ton of stuff that doesn't really work. I seem to remember there was a NES Final Fantasy 2 translation that was totally broken but worked great on Nesticle.
Yea, these days emulators are the best development tools. When I was into Gameboy dev I'd do everything in no$ and only use a flash cart when everything was working as intended. Emus w/debuggers > flash carts. Unless you just want to play warez.
Woah there. While emulators are great, particularly when they have powerful debuggers, they still can't replace real hardware tests. Emulators, even the best of them, have faults in emulating all the quirks of hardware. So while they certainly have their place, you can't just assume because it works on the emulator it will work for real.
On a similar topic does anyone know if there has been any progress on the release of this... http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=464 Anyone on the board involved?
They are some info on this site on the megadrive pinout. http://nintendoallstars.w.interia.pl/romlab/segalab.htm I guess it would be possible to make a simple adapter using a megadrive female cart slot --> programmer to rewrite on a flash memory.
I bought an mark III adaptor to play US games, an great work, plays all US games that I tested. I do recommend tototek
That's the fault of the ripper of the PSF though I imagine. But PSFs aren't quite in the same place as when people make hacks or translations of games. It really is annoying when they do and it doesn't work on the real hardware and then also doesn't work on every emulator, only ones that are at a certain level of inaccuracy. ZSNES I know is responsible for a number of hacks not really working just like Nesticle was. But that's what happens when people don't have access to options ilke flash carts to test their creations.
UMDK That's my project. I realised I had designed myself into a bit of a dead end with it, so I'm in the process of completely redesigning it with Hi-Speed USB, 8Mb of SDRAM and an FPGA. The only things which remain are the SD-card and the MegaDrive! Let me know if you're interested in collaborating on it. If you're interested in the designs for mk1 (the dead end), you can download them from here: http://www.makestuff.eu/umdkv1/umdk.tar.gz. That includes schematics, PCB layout, PLD source, AVR source and the MegaDrive menu program source. It's a bit messy, I can't be bothered to tidy it up because I consider it to be a dead end. The next version (imaginatively called umdkv2) will be completely different. - Chris
There is the "Neo Myth" as well. I ordered it on ic2005.com 3 years ago, still waiting for it. But www.neoflash.com says it will comes out this month..Let's see.. Oh and there is this too: http://www.neoflash.com/forum/index.php/topic,3989.0.html But I would definitely recommend to choose Tototek stuff. "Neo" stuff isn't very reliable, even if they were first for NDS hardware.
I got one in last week. Works great, loading is noticeably faster than the tototek. Still trying to figure out if I can use a CD bios on my CDX for imports. I'm using Windows 7 and their updated 64bit driver works perfectly.
