BennVenn
Offline
Australia

Is there any interest in a budget NES Flash cart?

I've ordered a few of the 'Coolboy xxx in 1' carts and with a little effort they are re-flashable. I'm designing a daughter board that fits between the 60 pin cart and the 72pin adaptor board, and will enable USB uploading of ROM's to the cart. All contained within the NES Cartridge.

There is a requirement to lift 2 pins of the Flash IC (RD + WE) and solder them to the daughter board. If this sounds a little too complicated, I can sell them pre-modded.

Also, you can use the daughterboard as a stand-alone 60 pin flasher. You'll still need to lift and solder those two pins to a small socket but it will turn a $5 Coolboy cart into a pretty cool flash cart.

Links:
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/72-Pins- … 11547.html
http://www.aliexpress.com/item/No-repea … 13816.html

Let me know what you think!

Price? Aiming for under $20 for the assembled board

MaxDolensky
Offline
Alabama

Curious - will this be flashable via USB? If so, consider a lot of people interested, I am sure.

catskull
Offline
NUMBSKULL

The cool boy carts can't save though, right? Sounds cool though, just not totally sure of the viability. I have the famicom ones though and I'd sure like to reflash it with some good games and a sensible menu.

BennVenn
Offline
Australia

Yes via USB, and yes some can save. The 'Rockman collection' cart has Zelda and a few others which save to SRAM. The 400in1 doesn't have SRAM or a battery. So It depends what you want to do with it - which cart you'll need. I'll order a few of the Rockman carts for testing this evening.

nordloef
Offline
sweden

If they'll support Neil Baldwins music software I'm sure people will be interested, me included.

Jazzmarazz
Offline
Michigan

!!

atomsmasha
Offline
perth, WA

keeeeeeen

DSC
Offline

The real trick would be able to read and write .sav's.  Especially for Neil's stuff.
Big interest from me if that capability would be present.

Timbob
Offline

Have some yes's

herr_prof
Offline
Unsubscribe

if it supported the neil baldwin mappers i bet it would do well here.

tenshun
Offline
san diego

im interested in this! count me in!

BennVenn
Offline
Australia

Read/Write of save files will be no problem. I'll need to look into Neil Baldwin's ROM and mappers. As far as I know (what is documented) these carts support MMC3 and a few primitive logic based mappers.

Thanks for the interest and suggestions. I'll keep this thread updated with my progress. Time to get the old NES out!

Edit - It looks like some of Neils' ROMs require a SXROM layout, an MMC1 with 32k PRG RAM. I'll need to have a play around but it doesn't look like these carts will support Pulsar or PR8 without modification to Neil's source.

The Specs are right for his ROM though, support for up to 2mbit of ROM & 32kbytes of PRG RAM. It is just a mapping issue. Does Neil visit CMO often?

Last edited by BennVenn (Dec 1, 2015 12:12 am)

DSC
Offline

I can put you in direct contact with him, but he is very busy and does not really have any time.
We worked together on a MCTRL version of PR8, the best ever IMHO.
His ROM's won't run without 32k PRG RAM.  The ROM actually has a warning screen that lets
you know you don't have 32k available.  He uses every bit of it too. big_smile

BennVenn
Offline
Australia

Thanks DSC, that would be good. I've sent an email through his NTRQ email link so I'll give it a few days to see if I get a reply. The RAM is on these coolboy carts, it is just changing his mapper routines to access it. The good news is MMC3 is far easier to communicate with than MMC1 (Less ASM code) so it would be fairly simple to patch his ROM to use the MMC3. Still, I'd rather not have to dig through NES ASM.

BennVenn
Offline
Australia

I was just looking over the ROM list on the coolboy cart with the sram on board. Rockman 1-6 use a selection of mappers including UNROM, MMC1 and MMC3. Unless the ROM has been modified this is great news for compatibility with Neils ROMs.

When the cart arrives ill dump the ROMs to see if they are stock or modified. Hopefully the SRAM is bank switched as Neil's code expects.

nikola
Offline
Sergy, France
BennVenn wrote:

I was just looking over the ROM list on the coolboy cart with the sram on board. Rockman 1-6 use a selection of mappers including UNROM, MMC1 and MMC3. Unless the ROM has been modified this is great news for compatibility with Neils ROMs.

When the cart arrives ill dump the ROMs to see if they are stock or modified. Hopefully the SRAM is bank switched as Neil's code expects.

Hey, I'm just now starting to follow these developments, and I'm really interested in using Neil's software on some NES or Famicom cart. Does your new NES flash cart support Pulsar, or were you able to figure out whether some coolboy carts can?