Apologies for digging up an old post,  I've been working on a new startup.gb for zeigler type carts (am29f040/am29f016 on mbc1 donor with mbc1 ea00 & ea01 on high address lines of flash chip).   
I am trying to get the cart to do a partial erase and rewrite new banks/roms so that it isn't limited to just three different roms controlled by the ea00/01 lines (the mbc1 2mbit rom/32kbyte mode). 
According to the specs: Minimum 100,000 write/erase cycles guaranteed, the flash wear shouldn't be too much of a problem?  If everything works according to plan, i can add some kind of wear levelling so that the sector rewrites get distributed a bit more evenly.
Also, as the initial menu program won't get touched, the risk of bricking is minimised.
I was wandering if anyone else has tried?

I don't know what happened, maybe it's something with the CD itself. Gonna give it another go. Hopefully I can install the drivers from the CD, so I won't have to bother with burning a CD next time.

How does burning a CD not work?

You need to install a special driver for flash drives, though. Google should help you find it.

Yea, please do! There's a very detailed tutorial on youtube on how to make the 4Mbit flash cartridge, so if you could get multiple roms working, I would try to build one to store nanovoice, shitwave and MuddyGB!

I have a Windows 98 machine set up, the problem is that I can't figure out on how to put stuff I downloaded on my modern machine to the old machine. Already tried burning a CD, putting it on a flash drive, but nothing seems to work.

Startup.gb only works with software especially written and compiled for it. It absolutely cannot work with existing ROMs. Just forget about it.

The point of the Polish student design is to replicate the design of a Nintendo MBC5 cartridge, but with a flash ROM chip instead of a read only ROM chip. Since it's just using an actual MBC5 control chip, it's limited in that regard to what original cartridges could do. Since it has a flash chip that is directly accessible from the GB CPU, you *could* make a multi ROM system where you merge several ROMs, and a piece of code that writes a new ROM to the bottom area of the flash chip, which would enable different programs to coexist. But there are several problems with this approach:
* Flash chip wear from repeated writes to flash memory.
* You risk "bricking" the cartridge every time you select a new ROM, if the power goes out or something else unexpected happens. (By bricking I mean that the cartridge needs to be rewritten from the computer.)
* The total flash memory size as well as the time it would take to load a new ROM would make this pretty useless for anything but rather small ROMs.
* The software required for this would have to modify the ROMs, which might be a bit tricky.

Hmm, but if anyone actually wants me to try to make this software...

Also Bung carts If I remember correctly.

none of my computers are old enough to test this. you need like windows me or something really old. XP was even too new ( and had listed compatibility issues)

dunno.  i have a hunch you need not only the EMS multi-ROM menu, but also the EMS software to reformat everything into a larger aggregate ROM.  so, this wouldn't work for the ziegler design either, because the EMS software is proprietary to their products.  it won't write/erase the ROM on the other designs.  it only has limited SRAM function.

What about the startup.gb ROM thingie using Readplus? It says that it will create a multicart with up to 3 ROMs. It looks like it should be able to handle MBC5 cartridges.

I remember when I used some really cheap gba flashcarts, you were able to create a rom file with multiple roms from a simple windows app. I wish that was possible here.

Is it really something the cart supports? I always thought the ems software just packed the roms together with a little menu, so if you copied a multi rom off a cart you could blow it onto any mbc compatible cart you wanted.

anything based off the ziegler-hosted 'two polish students' design can only handle one ROM.

this includes the bleepbloop, smartboy, and apeshit cart designs.

the only currently manufactured cart which out-of-the-box works with multi ROMs are the EMS carts.

12ianma, good call.  forgot about the emerger carts.  they haven't been made in a while (unfortunately, i think there are a lot of fans here).  they have the coolest shape of all too!

not sure about the bung x-changer carts.  they may have a multi-ROM menu as well.

the derp carts also only can handle one ROM.

Does anyone know how these cartridges were designed? I thought I read somewhere that they were similar to the bleepbloop/ DIY cartridges design, but I'm not shure. If they are, they should be able to handle multiple ROMs

Emerger carts aswell, an emerger cart will hold multiple saves aswell

Shit.