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[starcrud]

I have seen snes carts here in my country(philippines) which have like 30 games in 1 cart. I have never understood how and what they used to make such. Can someone be kind enough to give me info on this? thanks






also where to buy blank snes carts like those.

[cd_vision]

The carts aren't blank. They use ROM chips the same as normal carts do. They have just burned them with different data. It's not possible to buy a programmable cart that holds that many games (yet), but the Superflash can hold up to 4 and is programmable. so that's a good substitute.

[kyuusaku]

There is no such thing as a blank cartridge, a catridge's ROM may be replaced with SRAM to become writable however and in Japan there was a FlashROM based cartridges sold by Lawsons stores called "NP catridges", I'm not sure where that name came from though.

Multicarts, containing multiple games are unlikely to contain 30 SNES games. SNES games are typically at least 4 megabits and 30 of them is simply not feasible since that's an extremely expensive amount of ROM. I think 8 x 4mbit games would be more realistic. These work by containing one or more ROMs that hold the games. Most likely the games are all of the same size/mapping so that they could operate interchangeably if one switched the ROM chips between them. If they weren't, the cartridge would require a great amount of logic work that also isn't easy for bootleggers. Besides the ROM chip(s) the multicart also has onboard logic that is used to switch games. In theory this works similarly to the original NES's bankswitching.

A multicart, (lets say 32M) is broken into 8 pages, each containing a whole game. When the SNES starts, the multicart's hardware selects a specific hacked game first which starts into a menu screen instead of the actual game. The player then selects a game from the menu, the menu program writes to a "game select" register. If the player selects the game with the menu code hacked into it, it just jumps to the real start of the game. If the player chooses a different game from the menu, the SNES writes a value to a game select register which will select a different "page" and map it into the same 4m memory space and jump to the reset vector to start that new game.

[starcrud]

I can assure you that I have seen and actually played off these carts. They sell like almost 40 dollars here and they work. The only problem is that alot of them dont last for months.

[DjoeN]

[cd_vision]

So of course the next question is.. why would you want something like that if it's only going to last a few months anyways?