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Thankyou!

Yeah, I've put a few posts out on FB in various groups and have been given a lot of input into what is wanted.

Yes, gigabytes of saves/roms is the idea behind this cart, also bringing the price down. Over in Aus, an Everdrive GB goes for $200+

so right now, I'm finalising the part selection. I've gone with a modern 8mbyte Flash ROM which half will be dedicated to the bootloader which leaves the maximum ROM size at 4mbytes. SRAM has been chosen at 128k for LSDJ users.

A lot of people said the slow transfer time from SD to GB needed to be addressed. The problem is 4mbytes of SRAM or even PSRAM is both expensive and difficult to solder (BGA) so I've gone with the fastest Flash ROM I could find, supporting 1.3mbytes per second write speed. The delay will now be the GB's bus and clock speed. Realistic throughput will be approx 100kbytes per second, which to me is acceptable.

FRAM was another option for batteryless saves but with the SD card there, and auto saving an option at startup I think I'll pass on the FRAM too.

I'll be sending the design off to the PCB house tonight to get a batch of 10 made up in HASL before I commit to gold plating. It's not suitable for continuous use as lead/tin will pollute the GB connector and give poor reliablitly. But if anyone here would like to be a beta tester of the first batch, please contact me! It would be best if you have a background in GB ASM or already have a Joey Joebags as all the firmware can be restored in the event of a corruption in the early stages of development.

On the NES cart front, My PCB's are on their way for the cart reader/writer. I'll be making a generic NES flash cart withi multi mapper support, again at around half the price of existing solutions. Got it all drawn up in CAD, just want to test a few things on a protoboard before I jump in on that project.

I am taking a month off work in May to spend full days on these projects to get them up to scratch. They should be available in my store very soon!!!!!

Come visit me on FB (BennVenn Electronics) for updates and pics and all that good stuff.

Ben

Catskull, PM'd

I'll make a little board you can drop in, wire to the appropreate points and BAM! Wonder if there would be room on the back of the powersupply. 2 birds with 1 stone.

Where does the pot sit?

If you were super keen, you could drop in a small AVR that will interrogate the keypad at turn on, You could select RGB colours like you do paletes on a gbc!

Yeah, they're all pretty power hungry. Never had that probelm with my carts though. Older CPLD's/FPGA's use a fair bit of current. Newer ones can shut down logic blocks that aren't being used.