new project game genie in the cart with micro sd card

Discuss hardware-related topics, such as development cartridges, CopyNES, PowerPak, EPROMs, or whatever.

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cecilmax
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Joined: Tue Jan 23, 2018 7:33 am

new project game genie in the cart with micro sd card

Post by cecilmax »

Hello,

I have the project of creating an adapter circuit board to put inside existing cart to act like a game genie.

What for ? let say I would like to apply permanently a IPS patch of super mario bros 3 onto an genuine super mario bros 3 cart.

But I dont want to touch the original pcb of the game. I would like to take the pcb of the game genie, put it into smb3 cart and plug the smb3 pcb into the game genie pcb.

But I dont want to have to enter game genie code each time I power on the game.

How I could solder a microSD card holder onto the game genie pcb and programming a new chip on it to read the IPS file (onto the microSD card) to apply the changes to the game ?

Programming the chip to read the sdcard and ips file is a step, but how to read the data from the original pcb connected with the top 72 pins, apply the patch and send the data to the other 72 pins ?
lidnariq
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Joined: Sun Apr 13, 2008 11:12 am

Re: new project game genie in the cart with micro sd card

Post by lidnariq »

The original Game Genie provides no way to inspect what the cart plugged into it is - once you switch from "enter codes mode" to "replace memory mode", that's it.

So unfortunately, since there's no way to detect what game is present, there's no way to map from that game to a set of cheat codes.

Additionally, a Game Genie can only patch three bytes - if converted to an ips that would be at most 26 bytes. The average ips file is much bigger.
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aquasnake
Posts: 515
Joined: Fri Sep 13, 2019 11:22 pm

Re: new project game genie in the cart with micro sd card

Post by aquasnake »

Just like the retro N5, you need to dump the cart to ram first, then analyze the IPS patch, and rewrite ram on some addresses again, which will be more complex than flashcart
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