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Suggestion for new series of flashcarts

 
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Videogamer555



Joined: 01 May 2009
Posts: 102

PostPosted: Sat Sep 27, 2014 6:04 am    Post subject: Suggestion for new series of flashcarts Reply with quote

Most flash carts anticipate that the user will want to have multiple games on it (because flash memory has a lot of space). However these things have menus to select the game. I'm looking for that "original game feel". You know, you power on the machine and your game boots up, like genuine cartridges made by game manufactures. Current flash carts, with their menus don't give me that "original game feel". I want a flash cart that I can put one game on an SD card that can be inserted into the device (or a flash cart that has a built in flash chip, with a USB transfer cable), and then it will play the one game in the flash memory.

But what if there is more than one game in the flash memory? There are several ways this could be handled. Specifically 1 of the 3 below techniques could hardwired to the BIOS of the flash cart that would determine how booting would proceed (the 3rd one would actually be very flexible and allow the user to configure for himself what technique would be used).

Technique 1: Automatic Mode Determination
This will let it automatically check if it should run in single-game mode, or multi-game mode. If there is more than one rom on the cart, display a game selection menu. If there is only one rom on the cart, play that one without showing a game selection menu.

Technique 2: Alphabetic Rom Selection
If there is more than one rom on the cart, automatically play the one who's filename comes first alphabetically.

Technique 3: Use a Settings File
The first thing that happens on boot up, if it finds more than one rom is to check for settings.txt (if there's only one rom, that rom is booted and it does not try to find the settings.txt file). If there is more than one rom, and this settings.txt file is not present, then it should display an error message that says "The file settings.txt was not found." and then stop the booting process. Within that settings file there are 2 parameters (each of which has this format "ParamName=ParamValue".

BootTechnique = 1, 2, or 3
BootTechniques 1 and 2 are the same as the Techniques listed above. BootTechnique 3 refers to having it depend on the next parameter for rom selection.

DefaultRom = Put the name of the rom to boot from here
If more than one rom is on the device and BootTechnique=3, it then checks this DefaultRom parameter. If the rom with this file name is not one of the multiple rom files on the device, then it displays an error screen with the message "Default rom not found" and stops the booting process. If the DefaultRom parameter is missing, but BootTechnique is set to 3, then this should generate the error message "DefaultRom parameter is missing." and the booting process should be stopped.





How to handle game saves:
Too many times, flash carts depend on flash memory only for the roms, but require ram for the game saves, just as the official released game cartridges did. Now ram requires a power source to keep it saved, so it runs on a battery. And now your flash cart has the same problem as official game carts. When the battery dies, so do all your game saves (just like normal store-bought game cartridges). I propose that any game save simply be written to the flash memory chip as a file with the same name file-name as the associated rom game, but with the file-extension .srm (so it would look like "RomFileName.srm" for the game save file, and "RomFileName.smc" or .sfc or .bin or .nes or .gb for the game rom file). Furthermore, this will permit any game progress made in an emulator to be transferred to the flash cart (or any progress made on the real hardware to be transferred to a PC where you can continue from your last save point on an emulator).



How big of a "series" am I speaking about? You may have noticed I spoke of a series of flash carts with these properties in the title of this thread. You may also have noticed in the last paragraph I spoke of different file extensions for roms (like .smc, .gb, etc). Well, that's because I believe that the way I have described the way this flash cart should operate is so ideal that actually should be used in flash carts for a variety of systems. The systems I would like to see supported are:
NES/FC
SNES/SFC
N64
Gameboy
Gameboy Color
Gameboy Advance
Sega Master
Sega Genesis
Sega Gamegear



And one final note:
These flash carts, if they do not depend on an external card like an SD card, and instead use direct USB connection (and have an internal flash memory chip), should NOT depend on proprietary software (like you needing the flash cart's manufacturer's special transfer software, as most flash carts do, unfortunately). Instead the internal flash chip should behave as an ordinary flash drive, and upon plugging it into your computer's USB port should be treated as an external USB storage device (like a standard USB thumbdrive) and allow directly reading and writing to it using Windows Explorer (the standard file manager software that comes with Windows). This will mean that the device's BIOS will need to handle reading FAT16 or FAT32 file systems (rather than depending on its own file system, as that would require on the PC end that special software be installed, which I'm trying to avoid). It wouldn't need to support NTFS, and the manual for the device could specifically state such, that when formatted on the computer, it must be formatted in FAT16 or FAT32, not NTFS.
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