Startup.gb only works with software especially written and compiled for it. It absolutely cannot work with existing ROMs. Just forget about it.
The point of the Polish student design is to replicate the design of a Nintendo MBC5 cartridge, but with a flash ROM chip instead of a read only ROM chip. Since it's just using an actual MBC5 control chip, it's limited in that regard to what original cartridges could do. Since it has a flash chip that is directly accessible from the GB CPU, you *could* make a multi ROM system where you merge several ROMs, and a piece of code that writes a new ROM to the bottom area of the flash chip, which would enable different programs to coexist. But there are several problems with this approach:
* Flash chip wear from repeated writes to flash memory.
* You risk "bricking" the cartridge every time you select a new ROM, if the power goes out or something else unexpected happens. (By bricking I mean that the cartridge needs to be rewritten from the computer.)
* The total flash memory size as well as the time it would take to load a new ROM would make this pretty useless for anything but rather small ROMs.
* The software required for this would have to modify the ROMs, which might be a bit tricky.
Hmm, but if anyone actually wants me to try to make this software...
Last edited by nitro2k01 (Jul 12, 2012 4:38 am)