Good Carts for Development Purposes

Good Carts for Development Purposes
by Great Hierophant on 2005-07-18 (#2879)

Okay, so you wish to make a development/flash cart. First, you need to find boards that offer maximum compatibility with games. Games with special chips generally aren't worth modifying because only one or two games use them. Otherwise, SA-1, SDD-1, SPC-7110 and Super FX+FX2 carts use surface mounted ROMs or 16-bit ROMs.

Normal games use two types of boards, LoROM and HiROM. Any board you use should be able to accomodate 36-pin ROMs, and most do for 4 Megabyte and larger games. So you need two boards. I recommend using Mario Paint for LoROM games because it has a 32KB S-RAM. A few other LoROM games also use this RAM size. The cartridge can be had cheaply as it is abundant.

As for HiROM games, many RPGs will do but they are expensive. I therefore suggest something like Ken Griffey's Winning Run. It has 8KB of battery backed S-RAM (I know of no HiROM game to use more) and has a 4MB ROM (no extra wiring to the address decoder.) As it is a sports game its not too difficult to find.

by Bregalad on 2005-07-21 (#2956)

I've not much knowledge about SNES boads, I just noted they were noted SHVC-*board name* just like the famicom are noted HVC-*board name*, but all US and PAL NES games are noted NES-*board name* instead, but they're still noted SHVC with the SNES.
Also, there is various LoRom and HiRom boards, there is only two software possibilities (one have 32kb pages and the other one 64kb pages, but don't ask me more info about this). However, there is more than two different boards. Some cartidges have only one ROM chip, but some have two to get other rom size (like 12 MBytes or 24 MBytes).
Also, there is the battery/non-battery thing. There is also a chip called MBD-1 or something that does the job of a mapper (??) on recent cartidges with battery. If someone has more info about it, don't hesitate to post is, or put a link to a page where this is explained.