INL HiLoROM SNES flash cart

[infiniteneslives]

That improvement cut me down to where I'm at currently with ~2.5min for 32Mbits.

So that will be in the next update then? =) When I tried I roughly measured around 10 minutes for 32Mbits. 2.5min for 32Mbits is very acceptable.

I ran 2.5min for 32Mbit when I made that post on the 25th. Have you updated your firmware recently? The 10min speed you've got sounds more like what I had with my release that was up in July. I need to start getting more formal with my releases. I'm adding new things every couple days so I just toss it up for download when I think it might be useful and stable enough for others.

[MottZilla]

I'll try updating the firmware but I thought I had the latest on there.

Update: My firmware and the INL programmer exe are the same as what I just downloaded from the website. It took approx 20~ mins to program 8 megabytes. I reuploaded the firmware with the batch file as well. Not sure why it's so slow. I am on the 64bit Vista. I never ran either "installer_x86" or x64. When I get a chance, I'll see if that's the issue.

Update: I tried everything I could think of. Programming the whole 8mbytes of flash takes roughly 20 minutes. The only other thing to try would be to try using my other PC. What's the normal programming time for 8 megabytes?

[infiniteneslives]

8MB boards are 5min currently, just verified that as well. Let me know how the other PC works out, might just send you a second board to see if that changes anything. Not sure what could be causing that though, make sure the .bat file is pointing to the firmware dated 8/19. Hopefully it's not a vista issue...

[mcmustang51]

Has anyone tested this with the 96Mbit Star Ocean (no chip) patched rom?

I bought the 4MB board.. knew I should of spent a little extra
if it does, I think I'll get antoher

[MottZilla]

I believe I heard that Star Ocean does, or will work on the 12MB/16MB boards. The "uncompressed" Star Ocean hack is 12 megabytes I believe.

[Intothedark]

And how much will it cost? lol

[infiniteneslives]

And how much will it cost? lol

They're currently available, and 12MB boards have been shipping for ~month now they're $26 each. I'm putting the finishing touches on the 16MB versions as well right now and am in process of getting the first of those out the door right now.

I want to thank everyone who supported this project in it's early release stages over the summer. I'm planning to end the 'pre-release' over the weekend as I've been able to build up stock on them so they can ship within a couple business days. In appreciation I've been giving free cases to everyone who's ordered during the pre-release. I have a good stock of the cases now from retroquest and will be offering the nice pop tab opening cases for $5 each when purchased with a board. I've also gotten a lot of requests for qty discounts. I expect by the end of the month I'll have enough stock on the shelf to allow for it, so you can expect to have the option to save some on bundles of ~5-12 carts.

The main hurdles to getting these things going was the assembly of the fine pitched parts with solder paste-toaster oven means of assembly. My buddy and I have gotten it pretty well down to a science by now though and been able to get the yields high enough to justify keeping the prices where they're at thankfully. I'm doing my best to keep the assembly in house in order to have rapid turn around times and flexibility of all the different options at a low price, that and it's always nice to keep the work from going overseas.

One other feature I was able to add makes use of a little more battery RAM. The basic setup is to have 32KB of sram, keep in mind some games that check for only 2KB will not like this. There are hacks to defeat that check, and the next revision I'm going to be adding jumpers to limit the visible size of the ram. Anyway, the thing I did was make two separate 32KB slots for the RAM based on the position of the Hi/Lo toggle switch. So what that allows to create a save of a LoROM game, reflash a HiROM game and make a separate save. You could then reflash the board to swap back and forth between the Lo and Hi ROM games while keeping the save intact for both. So it's nothing huge, but it was a free add so I went for it.

There are a ton of ways the 12-16MB boards can be diced up for creating a reset based multicart. I've got one general setup I'm going with, but if people have requests for specific setups I will entertain the ideas.

Next step is to make the firmware a little smarter and take care of the deinterleaving for 12MB gamedoctor files, and auto-doubling smaller rom images to fill the larger flash chips. I also need to figure out why two separate people have had issues with programming speeds. We've confirmed that it's not hardware releated, so probably something going on with the host application and the PC. The added challenge is that I haven't been able to recreate the issue myself, but I've got a few ideas of what might be going on.

[mcmustang51]

In terms of SRAM, is there a way to limit the size seen on old boards? I haven't found a patch for Super Metroid or its hacks


UPDATE: uCON64 is an older but good way to get around that

[infiniteneslives]

Right now the only good way is to lift pins on the SRAM and ground them. I can tell you which ones if you'd like to give it a try. On my next version I'll add some jumpers to allow you to halve the SRAM. I can get it down to 4KB with the CPLD, so the jumper would take it down to 2KB. Although my standard SRAM configuration is now two slots of 32KB (one hi, one lo). So a 4KB SRAM board would have to be a separate CPLD configuration so halving would bring it to 2KB. That's about the best I can do without adding more hardware.

[mcmustang51]

What is the multicart idea with this?

[infiniteneslives]

What is the multicart idea with this?

The idea is to use the reset signal to control a counter in the CPLD. I've tested it and got it working, but I'm having issues with the game I hoped people could use the 16MB boards for 4x4MB slots all sharing the same save slot.

I did have to put a low pass filter on the reset signal to get stable toggling from one rom to the next, but it's working in regards to the multicart feature. Having a multicart setup is a separate CPLD configuration though, and I haven't actually offered any reset based multicarts as of yet. I can, it's just a matter of explaining it all and putting the different options available for checkout. The 4-16MB and 128KB of ram can be sliced and diced into whatever config one would like, I will probably come up with some common ones to offer based on common requests.

[mcmustang51]

Any thoughts about expanding this to other consoles? GB, GBA, N64?

[tepples]

For GBA, I thought Chinese flash carts were already cheap.

[infiniteneslives]

Any thoughts about expanding this to other consoles? GB, GBA, N64?

yeah I have dreams to do everything under the sun.

To leak a little info I will say I'm working on a GB prototype right now. that's a long way out though, still a lot of polish needed on my NES and SNES boards before GB gets going. That and GB cart connectors aren't easy to come by without harvesting them from dead GBs.

GBA would probably require stepping up to BGA packaged memories which I'm currently trying to avoid. I should be able to handle them someday, but GBA flash carts are dirt cheap...

n64 would require a cic, but that will be done eventually by someone.

[hyarion]

That and GB cart connectors aren't easy to come by without harvesting them from dead GBs.

Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't GB and GBA use the same connector?
if so wouldn't http://dx.com/p/repair-parts-replacemen ... lite-37787 work?