I was thinking...I've got the same proble as some people experience with a proken page switching in a 64m USB cart. Would it be possible to take it apart and install a little switch to change pages in the cart (should've been done in the first place instead of on-off-on-off-off-on madness). I've got a switch that'll fit in the cartridge nicely and some mad soldering skillz. Just wanted to confirm if it's possible before taking the expensive toy apart.
What do you mean "a broken page switching"?
It's really easy to switch pages, just turn your DMG off then on again, I don't really see where the trouble lies.
Someone wrote either here, or on 8bc that the cart just stucks on the second page and it takes a lot of time and repeating on-off-on procedure to return it back to the first page so at the end I just had to put LSDJ in both pages and now, sometimes it would boot into page 1, but most of the times into the page two. People said it could be a deffective cart.
http://www.chipcoalition.com/64m-doesn- -t219.html for example
One of my carts sometimes has the same problem but it usually works fine. I think its a faulty/poor quality component causing the problem. I'm pretty sure that the page switching is controlled my the "C4" Capacitor. I was going to replace "C4" but I've just been slacking because my cart doesn't always have this problem and I don't want to break my cart trying to fix a problem that doesn't always happen.
As an option switching a capacitor will do the job of course, but from a modder point of view I'm interested to try and install a little switch So wanna know if it's possible at all.
I don't think its possible but if you figure it out let me know how you did it, OK.
they can and do hang on page 1 now and then, I'd ask nitro2k, he may be able to sort it out.
Actually, I don't have a fix for this. I think I recall someone managing to look it to one of the pages by removing that capacitor and maybe adding a resistor. Can't find the info on that now, though. If I had that info (or if I'll get time to sit down and investigate the cartridge) I could give you some more advice. You could just stick the same ROM onto both the pages and be done with it. That of course only gives you one ROM, unless...
Actually, the thing with EMS cartridges (buth these 64M ones and the earlier blue 32M) is that they have multi-ROM support. (The 64M cart is really just two 32M carts with a switch.) This means you can basically fill up the memory up to 32MBit with as many ROMs you can fit. For this you need a menu ROM which will do the switching.
There are already menu ROMs available, however these don't play well with LSDj for several reasons. I'm intending to make my own menu ROM to fix these problems. When/if I get that fixed, that will probably offset the fact that you only have one page available, since you're not limited to just one ROM anymore.
That would be a ver useful feature, nitro2k. Please keep me updated on your progress if you start getting into this. At the moment I am using same ROM on both pages, which is okay, but that's not what I payed for Would be nice to have a game on a second page or something.
So, what you're saying is, one page can be filled up with ROMs up to 32mbit and have like a boot-at-start menu ROM, which brings up the list of ROMs on the current page? And the same goes for another page. That'll be brilliant!
Can you link me to some menu ROMs, and just general info? And why are they not working well with LSDJ?
ROMs: http://www.personal.triticom.com/~erm/GameBoy/
The way you do create them is by merging files together. In Windows:
copy /b menu.gb + 1.gb + 2.gb out.gb
In Linux etc.:
cat menu.gb 1.gb 2.gb > out.gb
You basically smack them together to one big file.
However, there are two issues when using this with LSDj.
1) ROMs must be aligned to their size because of how the logic chip handling thesethings is working. For example, if the ROM is 128 kBytes big, it must be placed on an multiple of that size, like 128 kBytes, 256 kBytes, 224 kBytes and so on. You can't place it 64 kBytes into the combited ROM image, for example. This creates a problem for LSDj as it has to be placed either at the very start, where the menu ROM is supposed to be, or at the 1 MByte, 2 MByte or 3 MByte marks. The latter option is problematic because the existing menu ROMs don't have a clue they should look so far into the ROM, unless you just happen to fill up exactly the right space. (They stop looking when they don't see any more ROMs.)
2) SRAM management. The existing menu ROMs rely on being able to save the SRAM contents to the upper portions (32 kByte+) of SRAM. This is fine for games, but for LSDj, it will interfere with LSDj's file system. I think I have a solution for that too.
As for forcing a page one/page two selection with a switch, I believe that is possible. IIRC, the cartridge is just toggling the most significant bit of the flash chip to break one 64m chip into two 32m segments. Then there is a simple capacitor based switch circuit that waits to see if the power has been cycled fast enough to move into the second bank. This works by the assumption that C4 will drain all its power if the Gameboy is left off long enough. This design decision is a little bit problematic, in that to move to the second page all you have to do is cycle once, but to move back to the first you have to turn the gameboy off for the longer duration. This switching circuit could certainly be simplified into a toggle switch, since all it's doing is changing the line status of one address line on the flash chip.