ToToTEK.COM

[kyuusaku]

[CrackLtd]

Hehe! Now, that's Kyu again! Thats the Kyu we love, c'mon finish the last mile then, and I buy your system And i guess lot of people will, you finally get wealthy and you can invite your wife for a nice candle light dinner!

[kyuusaku]

Really this is only the beginning, building a PCB, ordering $1000s of parts, building a plastic enclosure, making a USB adapter etc is far more than I'm comfortable with. Maybe Tomy can do it with me..

[CrackLtd]

Well, illegal in a way i guess. I don't think SNK/Playmore will tolerate a NeoGeo backup System on the market. And the maker of such a device maybe will get problems with SNK laywers and force you to remove it from the market. Here in Germany Copiers never where sold 'officially' in shops, or at least only for a short time i think in the 90ies. There were some advertisements in Videogames Magazines but only for like a half year. It was nearly not possible to get a Backup Unit in a computer or gaming shop. Nowadays eBay also removes offers from sellers that give floppy disks with games or CD Roms with games (which is obviously illegal) but it seems backup units are just tolerated not more. So, in case you made it with the NeoGeo BackUp System you maybe will not have the super big market and possibilities. I don't know where you are, if youre china then youre at a cool spot for that, if youre in the USA then youre not. Sony forced LikSang to close down thair business, and dont underestimate the power of the companies. But don't get me wrong, i am just waiting for the NG Backup System, and i don't care where it comes from! (As i ever did with all the other copiers i already have, lol.) But i would love to see the working one from you. And now, get it going to work! Maybe its a good feel providing extra motivation for you to know that there is people, maybe not to many, but a hard core, that is really looking forward to your developments that should make you kinda proud. So in case you did not know yet, now you do. I cheer!

[MottZilla]

There is nothing illegal about a backup device. And if a company likes it or not doesn't matter either. Until you actually infringe on their copyrights or property you have done nothing illegal. By your assumption CD and DVD writers are all illegal because they can and are used for pirating music, dvds, and games. But they are not.

I would love to see a NeoGeo MVS Flash cartridge. But I understand it would cost perhaps more than it would to just buy all the NeoGeo MVS carts you are interested in.

[kyuusaku]

That depends on how many games you're interested in ;) It definitely can be done with under $200 of parts, making a reasonable price IMO around $400 so like three really expensive MVS titles. Personally, I'm not too interested in a copier/flash cart until I figure out the chip for MVS->AES conversion, since IMO copiers are for consoles. Until then I'd be content with just a universal EPROM cart for MVS. To populate it for even 700Mbit games only takes about $60 of EPROMs (25 of them!) plus maybe $30 for the PCBs and discrete logic. The downside is the couple hours to erase and program the ROMs, but it's so much cheaper and likely to actually be pulled off than the flash cart despite them being identical at the core.

[CrackLtd]

Any progress in the project since april?

[kyuusaku]

The EPROM cart? I still haven't figured out two things: 4M+ MROM bankswitching, and SROM bankswitching if it exists, I'm not sure. Before I make it, I also want to learn all of the signals on the connector so I can implement the cheapest/most efficient/accurate board, without a schematic this is hard. Someone offered me the schematic but hasn't come through...

[kruuth]

Just wonderind, but with the multicarts, is this a possibility now?

One of the larger ones, the 138 in 1 I think, loads the game into some sort of daughterboard.

[kyuusaku]

It's no different; even with the super large NOR flash available now, a flash cart either requires:

-in-system programmability of each ROM bus, which the Neo doesn't have
-a base programmer (like a GBA flash cart) and special mapper to unlock writes, which would be very expensive
-a multi-ROM emulator system, which is a tradeoff between something relatively cheap but very complicated to design or something easy to design but very inefficient/expensive/large/power-hungry

Multicarts on the other hand are just a regular cart albeit with very large ROMs, and an extra little mapper--relatively simple.

[RGB_Gamer]

I don't see MVS/AES flash carts ever happening, but if the company that makes the MVS multicarts would just make another cart with the remaining Neo Geo games that aren't on their 1xx-in-1 carts (the keep making those, and each one adds more KOF hacks, and maybe 1 or 2 games that the others didn't), I would be happy.

[MottZilla]

I agree that at this point with the multi carts out there that are fairly good from what I've heard, the only concern people looking to play the games cheap have are what games aren't available on one of the multi carts. There are some notable missing games I believe like Puzzle Bobble 2.

[RGB_Gamer]

[kruuth]

So how do the current batch of multicarts work then? The 138 in 1 supposedly loads the game into a daughter card. The 150 looks like a standard neo cart. How do these work?

[MottZilla]

Kyusakku said how it works. Basically there are really big ROM chips (or many chips) along with a mapper to map them to the appropriate areas. The menu probably just writes a simple CPU accessed register to bank switch the proper ROMs into place and then jumps to the reset vector.