So I was working and I thought, wouldn't it be keen if you could use the Transfer Pak as a programmer? Cheaper than a transfer II, easier than building. Connector is in there, it had to do something with those pokemon. Came home and did a little google found this site http://lacklustre.net/n64/ There is already a Rom and Sram dumper, and work is being done to run the pak with an emulator. This is awesome for non-usb carts. So I wrote an e-mail asking for more details, waiting for a reply.
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Too bad they have no mention of the everdrive 64. Most 64drive guys don't listen to updates that have taken ace on everdrive... The everdrive has 100% compatability aswell, and has the fastest loading times. plus it uses sd, which is cheaper and easier to acquire than CF. of course the cf used to be faster, but now with the OS updates and such everdrive is the fastest. no one even mention the neo myth 64 lol. Not even in the game.
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Sweeeeeeden
Yeah, this should work. Someone just needs to write the software. I'll ping mikeryan.
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You could always make a utility to write a Rom that writes to the cart, that way any flash cart would work. because there is already the rom/save dumper.
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Silicon Valley
Hey guys, I'm the author of agbd.
It's theoretically possible to flash a cart using the Transfer Pak, but it's a pretty bad idea.
The damn thing is totally unreliable: I get a good dump only about 2/3 of the time. That's the main reason I haven't implemented SRAM writes yet. ROM writes have an even higher chance of going bad (one bad bankswitch == fail).
I can take a look at implementing it, but I don't have any hardware to test with. What cart(s) would this work with?
zerolanding: never got your email, what address did you use?
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Bleepbloop carts (both USB and non can be flashed via flasher)
Edit:
Also I feel as if it would be more reliable because you know the size of ram and flash, it's not variable like the game carts. It's the same size every time
Last edited by 12ianma (Jul 24, 2012 3:54 pm)
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Silicon Valley
12ianma wrote:
Also I feel as if it would be more reliable because you know the size of ram and flash, it's not variable like the game carts. It's the same size every time
The physical communication is unreliable. Sometimes the Transfer Pak wigs out and you get no data, sometimes you all 00 or FF, and sometimes you get random bitflips.
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When you play one of the pokemons through the emulator, is it buggy? Like does the game snag and such...
does the n64 controller get 5v supplied to it? I wonder if it just just doesn't have enough voltage/amperage. I don't know much about the inside if the transfer pack, I'm just thinking out loud.
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Silicon Valley
12ianma wrote:
When you play one of the pokemons through the emulator, is it buggy? Like does the game snag and such...
When you boot Pokemon Stadium it loads the entire GB SRAM into N64 RDRAM. It verifies the checksum embedded in the SRAM and gives you this error if it's bad: http://lacklustre.net/n64/tpak_ffff.png (screenshot is from emulator).
When you play the game, it loads a subset of the ROM from the pak and loads the rest of the game from the N64 cart. Presumably it has internal checksums for what it expects from the pak.
To answer your question: you'll never get buggy game boy play on the 64, it will just refuse to run.
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Easton, PA, USA
nitro2k01 wrote:
I'll ping mikeryan.
Thank You Nitro!
mikeryan wrote:
zerolanding: never got your email, what address did you use?
Thanks for responding here, I must have typed the email wrong. I think I got all the answers from my email faster, and with more followups questions than I could comprehend. Just awesome, still. EDIT: I'm just bummed the hardware from nintendo is so dicey, could have been a very practical solution for flashing. I'll pick one up anyway, the guts should have some useful things for at least making a flasher.
Last edited by zerolanding (Jul 24, 2012 7:38 pm)
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Cleveland, OH
Haha dude! That's what I've been working on! I have the PCB laid out and everything!
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Easton, PA, USA
What! I'm mentally syncing on stuff everybody is working on lately... Now the cat is outta the bag, keep me posted. That is too good. You got any tranfer pak gut shots? Have trouble finding shots of that. It's funny that this is such head slappingly obvious idea. I'm glad you guys already though of it, from two different ends.
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Not sure if Justin wants me to say what he's working on publicly, but I'm pretty sure these are two very different things.
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Cleveland, OH
Nah it's cool, Rob. There's no point in keeping anything I'm doing secret after what we discussed. I'm just making some for myself at this point and I realized the N64 Transfer Pak is absolutely perfect. They're cheap. No one uses them anymore and they're everywhere!
I'll post some pics of my Pak torn apart and some screen shots of the PCB I designed the other day.