Makes me mad >:( when someone comes along and buys FlashBoy’s in bulk with the intention of selling them for profit. It’s sticking up the middle finger to Chris and me.
Seriously, what’s this obsession with cards about? Not everyone has a card reader/writer and not everyone wants one. Just go with standard Flash memory. Cards are all proprietary; Flash memory is not.
For me, the most important point for cards is multi game capabilities. You can basically have everything in existance for the VB on one card. There are no flash chips of a size anywhere near that what cards can offer.
Cards are also much easier to obtain than those old 5V flash chips needed for the VB.
Homebrew games can furthermore be much bigger, the only limit is that of the VB – 256 MBit! Maybe there’s even ways around that?
Another plus for cards is the writing speed, which is much much higher than flashing through USB.
I don’t want to contradict you, KR155E, but only the first of the benefits you listed are applicable here. Since Vaughanabe13’s intention is basically just to put the flasher and a “harddrive” on the cart itself, it’s just a FlashBoy with the added expense of a microSD card and reader/writer (which is not meant as an insult to the FlashBoy, just a statement that it doesn’t do anything you mentioned in your post :-D).
Unless something besides standard “FlashBoy” flash chips are used in the cart itself, the other benefits (which apply to things like the DS “R4” devices) don’t apply.
Let me be clear that I don’t think Vaughanabe13 is incapable of making an R4-equivalent for the VB, I’m just pointing out what his current plan seems to be (based on his own statements).
Well, that was my point: you don’t have to use flash. The DS carts (I believe) translate back and forth between the DS cartridge interface and the SD card interface, in real-time (with varying degrees of success).
I don’t know how difficult this would be on the VB, but probably no more so than for the DS, and probably less, given an FPGA or ASIC with enough I/O and space for FIFO buffers. And if Vaughanabe13 can do it for $6-$7 per unit, I’d buy at least two of ’em! 😀
RunnerPack wrote:
Well, that was my point: you don’t have to use flash. The DS carts (I believe) translate back and forth between the DS cartridge interface and the SD card interface, in real-time (with varying degrees of success).
I don’t know how difficult this would be on the VB, but probably no more so than for the DS, and probably less, given an FPGA or ASIC with enough I/O and space for FIFO buffers. And if Vaughanabe13 can do it for $6-$7 per unit, I’d buy at least two of ’em! 😀
First of all, there is absolutely NO way anyone could design, build and sell a programmable VB cartridge for that amount of money. With the DS you have a ton of companies that can just churn out those multicarts in China somewhere in bulk, and that’s why they sell so low. With the VB there are more problems than just what microprocessor to use. You have to take into account the cartridge design, and if you use donor cartridges you have to spend hours removing the components from the donor to use on the flash cart.
I’m not using a flash chip. They’re slow, expensive, and you can’t find any them anywhere except crooked NOS chip suppliers that charge 10x more than they’re worth. I’m using SRAM, probably 16 megabits, which is large enough to hold all VB games, AFAIK.
KR155E, the VB can only address up to 128 megabits, and there is no way to get around that. That being said, finding a 128 megabit flash or really any kind of volatile or nonvolatile 5V ram is impossible. If they do [still] exist, they would be really expensive, since there are much better modern alternatives.
Runnerpack, what’s the point of having a microSD card, you ask?
1) Store every game you own on the card at once and never have to take the cartridge out of the system or connect to your computer.
2) Be able to select what game you want to play via bootloader.
3) Tons of space for homebrew.
4) My design doesn’t use slow flash memory that takes minutes at a time to transfer one game.
5) MicroSD is extremely common and cheap these days. Heck, you can get a 1GB card for $5 USD if you know where to look. And almost every MicroSD card comes with an SD adapter, and just about every laptop manufactured today has a built in multi-card reader. Or you can buy a USB card reader for another 5 bucks. Not to mention many electronic gadgets use MicroSD for storage, like almost every phone that has an external memory slot. So no, it’s not expensive at all and very common.
Also, I did some research and I don’t think it would be possible to translate the ROM data in real time between the VB and SD memory (like a DS multicart), so I’m not going to design it that way. I could do it if I had the full SD protocol, but I would rather not pay thousands of dollars in royalties to Secure Digital. Companies can do that for their designs. I can’t.
Also, I’m just doing this for fun and because there is only so long the Flashboy design will be able to sustain itself, with the rarity of the flash chips and all. If you don’t want to buy one, nobody is forcing you to. And what am I saying, I’m getting way ahead of myself saying that this is something that would eventually be sold. My project is still in the planning stages anyway so it’s probably best if I don’t even talk about it on the forum anymore.
Why not make a flashcart that has an internal 128MB micro-SD card and card reader?
128MB is more then enough since the biggest commercial games are only 2MB and it comes eve ncheaper if you buy them for all flashcarts at once. Plus you can build in the card reader so you still have only a usb port for those that don’t have a (micro) SD card reader.
And if for some reason (secret storage or something :question: ) you really need more space you can open up the flashcart and replace the micro-sd card anyway.
You’d probably still need some flash the VB loads from directly because the VB can’t know what to load on the micro-SD card. And the menu you need to have on that flash that loads games from the SD-card will most likely be the hardest to make.
I know the guys over at neoflash have done such a menu for the N64 and are busy making it for their snes card (SD card reading). It’s open source so maybe you can learn how they did it if any of these consoles is similar to the VB.
RunnerPack wrote:
Well, that was my point: you don’t have to use flash. The DS carts (I believe) translate back and forth between the DS cartridge interface and the SD card interface, in real-time (with varying degrees of success).
Hm, but then my points do apply, or am I missing something?
Vaughanabe13 wrote:
KR155E, the VB can only address up to 128 megabits, and there is no way to get around that.
Plus another 128 using the expansion area! Though I am only repeating what I read on the forum… I have not looked into that myself.
Vaughanabe13 wrote:
That being said, finding a 128 megabit flash or really any kind of volatile or nonvolatile 5V ram is impossible. If they do [still] exist, they would be really expensive, since there are much better modern alternatives.
Sad, but true. The biggest 5V flash chip would be 64 MBit afaik, no idea about SRAM. But didn’t e5frog find a way to use 3.3V chips?
The VB would most likely ruin a chip that runs at 3.3V. The only possibility would be a chip that runs at 3.3V but has 5V tolerant inputs. But those are just as rare as the 5V chips so it doesn’t help.
The only way to get around using some kind of flash/RAM would be to right a routine in my micro that interprets the VB address requests, fetches the corresponding word from the SD card, and places it on the address bus. But I haven’t figured out yet if my micro will be fast enough to do that.
svenk91 wrote:
Why not make a flashcart that has an internal 128MB micro-SD card and card reader?
128MB is more then enough since the biggest commercial games are only 2MB and it comes eve ncheaper if you buy them for all flashcarts at once. Plus you can build in the card reader so you still have only a usb port for those that don’t have a (micro) SD card reader.
And if for some reason (secret storage or something :question: ) you really need more space you can open up the flashcart and replace the micro-sd card anyway.
You’d probably still need some flash the VB loads from directly because the VB can’t know what to load on the micro-SD card. And the menu you need to have on that flash that loads games from the SD-card will most likely be the hardest to make.
I know the guys over at neoflash have done such a menu for the N64 and are busy making it for their snes card (SD card reading). It’s open source so maybe you can learn how they did it if any of these consoles is similar to the VB.
Thanks for the tip on neoflash, I’ll have to check out what they’re doing.
There’s no point in using a 128 MB card because you wouldn’t be able to store all your roms on there.
When they’re padded they each take up 16 megabits (commercial and homebrew), BUT I might be able to get around this in firmware. I haven’t decided how I’m going to handle it yet.
There is no general requirement to pad them up to 16 megabit. That size is only chosen because of the size of the flashboy and other home made flash carts are that big.
DanB wrote:
There is no general requirement to pad them up to 16 megabit. That size is only chosen because of the size of the flashboy and other home made flash carts are that big.
The VB would most likely ruin a chip that runs at 3.3V. The only possibility would be a chip that runs at 3.3V but has 5V tolerant inputs. But those are just as rare as the 5V chips so it doesn’t help.
The only way to get around using some kind of flash/RAM would be to right a routine in my micro that interprets the VB address requests, fetches the corresponding word from the SD card, and places it on the address bus. But I haven’t figured out yet if my micro will be fast enough to do that.
Yes as DogP writes the pin 4 is selection pin for expansion area /ES – and there’s the magic pin to use another 128Mbits – apparently.
You can use 3.3V chips (and those of other voltages) if you use level converters – you will actually have to when the 5V chips become increasingly harder to find.
A solution with an SD-card would be the ultimate solution. It will have it’s limitations of course. If it has a limited SRAM that holds the whole ROM for normal parallel usage the size of this will limit the maximum size of the cart – however, as has been mentioned before, none of the commercial games are more than 16Mbit (2MByte).
If we want to open up for larger homebrews perhaps it would be nice to be able to use the extreme capacities of the VB. Running directly towards the SD card sounds like an interesting method…
Looking at the title of the thread I’m a little surprised it ended up here. 😉
