What CF cards does the PowerPak support?

roadkill988 · Post by **roadkill988** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 1:12 pm

Can Retrozone's NES PowerPak support more than 1GB CFs? Like can it support up to 4GB or more? (if there are even CF cards that big)

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 1:23 pm

When I went shopping for a CF card I couldn't find anything larger than 1GB, so this is what I use. Do you need that much space? I suppose that if you leave out the duplicates/variations you can fit all existing NES games in 1GB.

MottZilla · Post by **MottZilla** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 1:47 pm

Yes it supports 4GB as you can buy a 4GB card with it. So I would assume it works. I personally bought a 256MB CF card cheap for my PowerPAK and it fits alot of games on it, not every single game but still alot.

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 1:51 pm

With 4GB you could probably store everything, even the dupes.

Bregalad · Post by **Bregalad** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 2:07 pm

It don't support 16MB.

koitsu · Post by **koitsu** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 2:37 pm

Bregalad wrote:It don't support 16MB.

Typo? GB maybe? :-)

Bregalad · Post by **Bregalad** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 2:43 pm

No I have a 16MB compact flash, and the Power Pak doesn't support it.

Windows format it FAT12 automatically, that Powr Pak don't support so I had to format it FAT16 with linux, and I keep getting read errors with the Power Pak, even tough the card works fine with Windows.

It's a shame because NES games would have been among the only thing that is small enough to make a good use of the cart

tokumaru · Post by **tokumaru** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 3:19 pm

But couldn't this a brand thing, as opposed to a size thing?

Bregalad · Post by **Bregalad** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 3:23 pm

The brand is LexarMedia.

Post by **Memblers** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 3:23 pm

I have a 4Mbyte CF card that came with my first digicam. I thought it'd be funny to try that one, but I don't have a PowerPak yet.

Post by **tepples** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 3:58 pm

I bought a 2 GB card for $4 at a garage sale. I was planning to use it with my DS + GBA Movie Player until I bought a PowerPak.

bunnyboy · Post by **bunnyboy** » Sat Nov 28, 2009 5:36 pm

The only maximum size restriction is the CF spec max of 128GB. Those cards don't exist yet, but 64GB does. I regularly use a 16GB card for both NES and SNES.

USA NES set is ~256MB, every version of every NES/Famicom/Pirate game is ~2GB. 12,000 SNES games is ~16GB.

roadkill988 · Post by **roadkill988** » Sun Nov 29, 2009 8:43 pm

I was planning on putting all of GoodNES on it

which is like 3GB total I believe. I seen a 4GB high speed CF card at Target and might just pick that up but it's a bit pricey.

Xious · Post by **Xious** » Sun Dec 06, 2009 6:29 am

Do you have the latest firmware? Small card support was added recently, although I'm not positive on the exact bottom.

I have a Sandisk 8GB card in mine, so it supports at least 32MB to 8GB cards and probably larger, although anything beyond a 2GB card is overkill. I shoved an 8GB card in mine because my 1GB card died on me and I only had 8GB cards left on hand. I'm pretty sure that every dump of every NES/Fami/FDS game would total under 2GB.

The major two things to remember are:

Use directories and keep only a few titles in each, as storing too many file in one tree causes a slowdown of the UI. (Just like it can on older servers…)

The PowerPak doesn't sort games by any means at all: It polls the file system data directly and displays it as it reads it. This means that if you want an alphabetical list of the games, you must copy the dumps over in alphabetical order AND you must create directories in alphabetical order while copying the dumps.

(e.g. Make a 0-9 dir, then copy games beginning with numbers in numerical order, then create an "A" directory, copy the A-named games, then a "B" directory and so on.)

This will usually result in an alphabetical list of your games. Too bad the developer didn't include a bit of logic into the FPGA that did sorting from the PowerPak side without using the NES CPU. That would have been pretty awesome, but time consuming...

In any event, you are pretty safe with almost any CF card. The PowerPak isn’t too picky, so long as it is a FAT32 formatted CFC. Check the latest firmware docs too, as it may even support FAT12/16 now...

-Xious

Bregalad wrote:No I have a 16MB compact flash, and the Power Pak doesn't support it.

Windows format it FAT12 automatically, that Powr Pak don't support so I had to format it FAT16 with linux, and I keep getting read errors with the Power Pak, even tough the card works fine with Windows.

It's a shame because NES games would have been among the only thing that is small enough to make a good use of the cart