As I said before, it should be possible to make a 2MB cart, but my soldering skills aren’t the best, so I’ll have to see how I go before saying I can make them.
And I’ll have to look at my parts & production costs (I use a printable paper to do my PCBs and it can be a bit expensive) before I can give any kind of accurate price.
I’ll also consider designing a dumper/programmer, but due to the chips I use (PICs), and the fact I have to find a suitable replacement for a VB cart connector, it may also cost a bit.
…Just a quick figure, is US$50 (each) for cart and programmer sound alright? It may be more, maybe less. As I said I’ll have to see.
I will probably release all necessary documentation needed to make your own, but if you’re like most people, you’ll be more than willing to pay for someone else to do it. 😉
My class finishes at the end of November, so I should get time then to work on this. Until then I can’t really do much. :/
I’m about to consider what I’m going to do for may own flash cart(s). If I end up making one thats easy enough to build, I may consider taking requests. I’m hopefully going to be able to make a 2MB cart with RAM, but size restrictions may limit that.
What size are you looking for? 512KB, 1MB or 2MB?
And you want RAM with that? 😉
…And if you really want me to name my own price, how does US$500 sound? 😛
I’d have to first make it and see how much money/effort is required before I could give an accurate price…
KR155E supposedly contacted a magazine that is known to have a copy of Faceball, but unfortunately the guy say there’s no way he’d let the game be dumped, no matter how much we can pay…
*sob*
Hm… That Dragon Hopper sounds too good to be true… 🙁
any way you think to up the mem on VB? of course there will be a buttload of technical problems but is it possible?
Sure. You could always build a cart that has SRAM as part of the ROM space, RAM space or expansion space. Just map it to an area that the cart uses, but isn’t necessary for ROM execution. eg: IIRC the VB uses the last 512 bytes or so to hold the ROM header and interrupt addresses. This means that you should be able to wire up RAM to the lower addresses if absolutely necessary. This means that you could have up to 8MB ROM and 8MB RAM, as long as the chip select/enable bit are wired to the correct address lines.
Plus, there is an ‘expansion’ area available to the cart that might have been used for a SuperFX-type chip had the VB succeeded. You could also wire up the CS line of the RAM to be triggered when the VB reads this area, allowing you additional area for RAM.
…And then theres always replacing the existing RAM of a cart with something bigger…
Mind you, even if you were able to do all that, it’d mean that your cart would be the only one capable of running anything you wrote to use the eatra RAM, as it wouldn’t exist on anything else…
If your cart is the same as the EPROM one, the following should apply:
The 1st EPROM has its D0-7 going to D0-7 of the cart
The 2nd EPROM has its D0-7 going to D8-15 of the cart
All the CEs should be joined together
All the OEs should be joined together
All A? lines are as normal
The tricky thing is programming the chips. You need to split the ROM image into 2 files – upper bytes and lower bytes.
This can be done with some programs. I can’t remember their names.
That would be even less feasible than a flash cart.
Firstly, you would need it to be able to handle all the FDD BIOS calls nedded to access a floppy.
Secondly, ROM chips require a very fast access speed. I doubt that the FDD comes even close.
It may be possible to make a Super UFO-like device, but it would be little more than an even dearer and more complex version of a flash cart anyway.
