Maxd
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Literally every other flash cartridge out there uses expandable media - from the N64 to the humble Sega Gamegear. Why have we not seen any news for a cart using such media, or anything better is previewed and dies a silent death, often taking people's money with it.

There is only one kind of Gameboy cartridge for sale currently in the two main online stores: EMS. It relies on picky drivers, leading some of us on a Google goose chase to find the modified ones, it has a history of sucking power out of the Pocket, it relies on a mini USB connection for save backup, which can be damaged. It also has support for only one save.

I do not know about the rest of you, but I think that we can do better. I have looked at the options, and none of them are easy. Programming it will be difficult (I hate the Z80) and so will finding a way to mass produce the carts if they were to be finished. It just seems like unless you are lucky enough to have a Bleepbloop or a smartboy, you stand a larger chance at losing your save. I have had EMS carts die (battery) on me twice before at performances alone, and I recently just lost a save with 9 months of work while trying to back it up with a Mega Memory Card.

Why are we settling for a cartridge that sometimes requires use of a gimmicky save storer? I think that if there is a Gamegear cart with removable media we should strive for the same with the Gameboy. I mean, we are getting to a point when soon we will be using custom-formed cases for our DMG's, but some of the cartridges can't hold up to expectation. EMS is a monopoly in the market right now, and I cannot stand the quality it offers.

I know a bit about the hardware, a good bit more about the Z80, and a decent amount of experience with Eagle. I am not working on a cart per se, but let's say that if what I am working on in Eagle keeps moving at the rate it is, keep your eyes open in the next few weeks.

P.S.
Just want to say that before people jump to conclusions, etc., I am grateful for what great innovations in the chipmusic scene are being made. It just frustrates me that such a crucial tool is still underdeveloped in comparison to everything else.

Tetrasaurus
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Germany/Florida

I absolutely agree. I have never had to deal with the battery issues (yet), but ive experienced a hassle to try and flash roms on them with my mac. Leading to the problem with the driver issues. Im not very fond of using virtual machines to emulate a more suitable os for the ems flashing software either. There should be a cart that works on all os's without fail.

akira^8GB
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New York City

Krikzz is doing a GB Everdrive unless he cancelled it...

Last edited by akira^8GB (Dec 11, 2011 4:04 pm)

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

Ok, the problems with GB flash cart design:
1) The size restriction. You only have a limited board area and only one side of the board is usable for components. (GG for a comparison has like the double board size available to it, and can also use both sides without problem.)
2) To a lesser degree power consumption of whatever you put on the board.
3) GB is 5 V whereas you'd need to go 3.3 V if you want a reliable stock of flash and RAM chips in reliable sizes. That means you need level shifters for the buses, or possibly a 5 V tolerant FPGA/CPLD as a bridge to the other chips. (Hard to come by these days...)
4) Games that use saving expect battery SRAM, which means you need a battery which takes up valuable board space, or more expensive FRAM or MRAM.

So far, there have been two designs around using USB.
1) The GBflasher design, used by Jose Torres and Smartboy. This design originally used a serial port programmer, but later added a USB serial chip and then moved it onto the cartridge board. It was a 5V design right through and worked well across all platforms. (Because of the FTDI drivers.) However, it was slightly overpriced for what it was and ultimately Jose Torres got caught with his pants down using this design, specifically not to be used commercially. So that cartridge won't be sold again, probably. Smartboy just disappeared from the surface of the earth.

2) The oh so beloved and hated EMS. EMS carts are using a custom flash controller, also used for some of EMS's other products like their N64 memory cards iirc. It's using a (I think) 5 V low-power FPGA, that they may have had to finalize the chip fab for themselves. (I looked into that long ago and as far as I remember, the producer of the FPGA sold this model of FPGA as wafers/dies.)

If it wasn't for its problems (power consumption, stuck page problem, proprietary drivers) it would be a decent cart. It's got enough memory to hold a lot of stuff and actually has multi-ROM capabilities. What this means is that each of the pages can be filled up to the memory size (with some limitations regarding ROM image alignment.) However, this has gotten a bit of a bad rap because it's known not to work well with LSDj in different ways. (LSDj is badly aligned by default and its SRAM management is not compatible with that of available menu ROMs.)

So, the future?
1) abrasive's drag'n'derp which features standard USB mass storage compatibility = works on all platforms. However, it keeps the creator is a heaps busy. Current status: The hardware design is mostly done but the software needs some touching up. Expected ETA: Early 2012.
2) krikzz' Everdrive GB. I asked him about this many months ago now and he said he hadn't started working on it. He may have started working on it now, but I haven't seen any sneak peeks or announcements about it. I'm suspecting he wants to leave it for last because of the difficulties mentioned above.

kitsch
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matt's mind
nitro2k01 wrote:

I asked him about this many months ago now and he said he hadn't started working on it. He may have started working on it now, but I haven't seen any sneak peeks or announcements about it. I'm suspecting he wants to leave it for last because of the difficulties mentioned above.

last time i asked it was on the list of things to do, but he had a lot of other projects in front of it.  that was a while ago, he also likes to mention projects-in-the-works in his forum space, which he hasn't

Maxd
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The design I had considered for MRAM is very costly ($30 for 4 Mb chip), and FRAM is something completely different. I understand the space constraints, it's just frustrating that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place. There are literally almost no alternatives right now for the market or what is in the future. I already have money set aside for a drag'n'derp, but I want to try possibly something better, akin to an Everdrive GB. I just feel like if we are raising our standards for how we perform, our gear is the next thing to fix. I don't want to complain anymore, but I think this thread could shed some light on what the state of GB flashcarts is, since 8bc and other sites are fairly vague or just off-topic.

Last edited by Maxd (Dec 11, 2011 4:51 pm)

kitsch
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matt's mind
Maxd wrote:

since 8bc and other sites are fairly vague or just off-topic.

part of the issue is also competitive cart designs are restricted from advertising there.  (e.g., smartboy people were banned and posts deleted following this)

(i know i'm slightly biased in all this), but the EMS cart is a nice product especially considering the price (and the features it has).  during the time we sold bleepbloop carts, we had all sorts of quality concerns, EMS has  performed much better than they did overall and in the long-run.  for example, out of a batch of 100 (to make the math work better), we may get 2 carts that have some sort of issue.  the bleepbloop were right at 25% defective for us at the end.  i still get emails about resistors snapping off, or the power-switching IC going bad...  not to mention being stuck with a stack of dozens of broken BB carts which lack repair.  most of them suffering from the same things... 

the real issues with the EMS carts are in the drivers they're using.  this is almost the entire basis of troubleshooting emails for them.  drivers on win7.  if they'd change this, it would affect a lot with the cart.  but i doubt they will.  the assembly quality and overall design features are really rather nice.  installation isn't.  however, the time it takes to load ROMs is dramatically quicker than with the GBFlasher design.

the smartboy carts were very well put-together, that was a nice package.  terrible customer service, nice approach in their packaging and design though.

HPizzle
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Neo Jersey
Maxd wrote:

I think that if there is a Gamegear cart with removable media we should strive for the same with the Gameboy.

THAT would be awesome. but preferably more like the r4 card for ds where it just pops in and out, no screwdriver required.

akira^8GB
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New York City

It is a bit strange for me that krikzz has not put the GB cart on top of his priority list, if only because of the amount of people that would buy it .Demand for a console flash cartridge is, I believe, definitely higher on the Game Boy, for it being the most widely used chip music platform. Nintendo 64 Everdrive sounds laughable in my opinion.

Maxd
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There is very little room for removable media besides MAYBE a micro SD card, but I think we need more than just an entry-level card on the market (excluding the drag'n'derp). And there is a way to sort of get around having to have a save battery - when power is cut, have the cart force the SRAM to push everything to the SD card and write the data to a real file upon the next bootup. That is a trick used in most GBA flashcarts and I believe at least one Everdrive design.

The main issue is, we treat our Gameboys as more than just playthings, they are instruments. And your average instrument is a DMG, prosound mod, maybe a backlight, soldering iron + flux, an EMS cart, cables, and probably a LSDJ license. If you mod it yourself, you are looking at maybe $80 to $110, and if someone else mods your GB it's at most $150 for all that stuff. I am a semi-pro brass player, and I can tell you I had to spend more money on my bass trombone mouthpiece than that. Honestly, just like in the realm of "normal" instruments we have starter axes, intermediate, and pro level stuff. In our scene, everyone is basically on the a starter axe. Given, many know how to do amazing things beyond what I can fathom with this basic setup, but imagine how nice it would be to not have to have a GBC or GBP ith you just so in case your cart crashes you can try to restore a save with your megamemory card, or keep a laptop to reflash the save with. Or, heaven forbid, have to carry another cart which could also potentially fail. Just having a cart with, say, a micro SD card slot where you can more easily save incrementally, and load your previous save upon encountering a crash, would be nice. Or, one could even use a spare micro SD card (cheap as mess to get) and keep a copy of everything in your wallet in case of a huge crash.

I'm willing to spend as much money as my music is worth to me to have a secure cart, and I'm sure many others are as well. So why not expand upon that $35 cart and work on something better? I know I am. smile

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

Re GBA carts: Mostly, commercial GBA games use EEPROM natively, So they read/write their save data in a very predictable way. The same is really true for most games, even GB. On GB however, the save data is stored in a SRAM chip, and is mapped directly onto the memory map, so you can read/write it without latency. And LSDj (ab)uses this to use SRAM as working memory for song data. In games, the memory is typically unprotected when you load or save the game only, whereas in LSDj, it's unprotected on every little edit, and also when you play the song. So to answer the question, no I think GBA flash carts only detect when you save the game. Trying to flush SRAM to an SD card is a bit hackish and would probably require relatively large capacitors to do reliably. Perhaps even approaching the size of a battery, which would defeat the purpose of getting rid of it in the first place.

Zef
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I'll admit I've been very frustrated with my EMS cart in the past; primarily because of driver issues that took me a while to figure out on Win7. I eventually figured out that by mashing F8 on startup you can boot without Driver signature enforcement and that solved the problem pretty much, no annoying RC watermark either.

As it is though I'm fairly happy with it. I back it up regularly and it's only corrupted my data on me once; not bad for close to two years. The two page system is nice, really the only thing I'd like is more save space for songs and the ability to have more than one save file so I could play Zelda when I'm not composing haha.

I'm hoping the Drag'n'derp cart can deliver on these areas and I'm looking forward to it. LittleFM looks good too!

Maxd
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I did not know that about LSDJ and the way it uses SRAM, so I will need to rethink a good chunk of my deisgn. Still trying to work it out on paper before I trudge through Eagle. Thanks. I'd suggest rather than bitching about EMS (I feel like I have hmm ) let's save the rest of this discussion for another time. Either when I can produce a pic of a board or something if I can get one working, or after drag'n'derp is finished.

Moriokun
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Milwaukee Area, WI

The one question I keep asking myself while reading this discussion thread is how does the Nanoloop cartridge differs from the the Flash carts and the EMS carts. I know you can't flash your own custom ROM or Sav files onto the Nanoloop cartridge (Hence why I'd never buy one), but what advantage does it's closed hardware cartridge design have over the Flash/EMS carts?

nitro2k01
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Sweeeeeeden

The Nanoloop cartridge has an extra EEPROM chip instead of SRAM. This means it needs no battery and that you have to save your song before turning the power off. The main advantage, to be honest, seems to be piracy protection. The demo ROM is actually the full version, only that it can't save unless it's running on the appropriate hardware.

pixls
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Philly, PA, USA
nitro2k01 wrote:

The Nanoloop cartridge has an extra EEPROM chip instead of SRAM. This means it needs no battery and that you have to save your song before turning the power off. The main advantage, to be honest, seems to be piracy protection. The demo ROM is actually the full version, only that it can't save unless it's running on the appropriate hardware.

also just not having a battery to worry about it nice.