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Bike? I wish I had one again. For now I mostly walk or bum rides off other people!

EDIT: Oh yes, I almost forgot- having a bike in Minnesota isn't so useful for probably at least %70 of the year when it's too cold/wet/snow/ice to be able to ride one.

So, I've been trying, seemingly in vain up to this point, to wrap my head around shift registers and UARTs. I understand how the NVSRAMs work, and a bank of shift registers would get the job done for addressing, which gets about half of the problem done for doing SRAM backup or programming the cartridge via serial or USB, but the UART is making my head hurt. It's probably more likely I'll use a PIC microcontroller if I'm going to take this route, since most of those have a UART built in. It'd save the problem of sorting out the whole protocol-hardware thing since that's programmed into the PIC. Assuming I can get a decent schematic layed out then I can move on to doing code, which is going to be the hard part, since I have never done much coding and driver coding seems very intimidating.

HOWEVER: I will point out that despite all of this I'm still willing to do NTRQ carts to my previous spec! This new design will take a very long time given my skill level, and most likely I'll be making a programmable NROM flash cartridge before I ever get around to doing MMC1. I have tried reading the NVSRAM's data through my EPROM programmer/reader device and it does work. All you have to do after that is get into a hex editor to change it up into a .SAV file.

In fact, I should probably make another thread for ramblings about new flash cart development, since it's derailing this topic.

Well, I have no idea what's going on with it. It says there is a file naming mismatch.

That's a shame Battle Lava! Go play that game, right now! It's one of the finest retro styled games I have played in a very long time. The story is remarkable, the presentation flawless. The music fits just right, and both the difficulty level and length are just about right in my mind. It plays a bit like a mix of Metroid and side scrolling shooters like Gradius. On harder difficulty it plays like an exploratory manic shmup. I suggest you enjoy this game responsibly, with a good quality 8 way joystick designed for shmupping, like a Seimitsu LS-32.

And btw, I've given up with John and the monitors. He keeps ignoring me, it's probably not gonna happen. Between loosing my job and being done with school I have a good deal of time to play with IIgs and other hardware hacking projects. Maybe we should hang out some time.

Well, thanks for the input guys! This is very helpful. However, the lack of backups being a problem does puzzle me. After all, the NVSRAM I'm using is really and truly not volatile, as the acronym would suggest. The lack of a battery which could fail and the automated flash backup which takes place on the chip itself would seem to be pretty fail safe to me.

Of course, I would agree that doing something like this would seem pretty silly without an easy way to update it by yourself, since people would probably be averse to mailing the cartridge to get updates. As for the $5 EPROM programmer, it's a very nice looking design, and could be handy.

Lastly, when I think about doing NTRQ carts, I keep thinking of the way Nanoloop is being sold- not upgradeable and backups only available through a separate device. Perhaps if I made my cartridge fixed on one version in order to reduce cost?

Ah well, back to the drawing board it would seem. Unless Koatl is really hopping for one of my deficient designs I'll probably scrap this round.

If you don't mind doing it for, say, MMC1, that'd be excellent.