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Ideas for the on-hold N64 cart

 
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radorn



Joined: 08 Jul 2007
Posts: 6

PostPosted: Sun Aug 05, 2007 11:55 pm    Post subject: Ideas for the on-hold N64 cart Reply with quote

Hi:

Nowadays the rom modding scene is very active, or at least there are being very impressive achievements, especially for n64, like the mods and powerful editors for super mario 64, goldeneye, f-zero x, and somwe others, wich allow levels of modifying that are really awesome and exciting.

N64 tools for playgin all those things in real hardware are scarce and not easy to get for everyone, like me.
I can't seem to be able to get a fully working gameshark/actionreplay unit with parallel port, not to talk about a copier in wich to put modified games.

I really can't talk about comercial viability of new n64 products nowadays, I'd tend to think they would be, but maybe it's just me and other like me who are very enthusiastic, but I think ToToTEK could benefit from the opportunity and release a definitive N64 cart that had all the good stuff in it.

In reality, I would buy any decent n64 flashcart tototek would release. I wouldn't mind if it didn't even support multiple roms... as long as it had complete compatibility and stable performance, I would settle with a single game cart. But if you ask me what I would LIKE to see, it would be something like this:

1. For it to be RAM based with an external memory card port: The reason of this is I'm a bit paranoid about Flash memory life. I don't want my cart to die because the flash chips wear out, so to me, the ideal set up would be to use an external memory (CF, SD or what ever you like, I don't have any special preference in that regard), and internal RAM in wich the rom would be loaded. A possible mechanism to do this would be this:
When first powered on, the cart would be in a state in wich it would load an internal program (flashable or not), wich would allow the user to select the rom to load into the cart's main ROM, then issue a reset (hard or soft, as the dessigner sees more fit). The console would start again, but now the cart would be in a different state and would instead boot the game previously loaded into RAM.
I thought of this mechanism because it looks to me as giving the most compatibility, as it doesn't rely on RAM-resident loaders or other tricks that could possibly make the environment "non-clean".
Anyway, as I don't know much about electronics and low level logic, this scheme may be excessive. To me, anything that makes up for a true CLEAN environment while it saves you from having a cart that will eventually die for being written to too many times, is good enough

2. Add a built-in Action Replay, which would be configured and activated/deactivated from that "first-boot" menu. This is because the N64 ActionReplay/Gameshark version wich had the parallel port seems to be hard to come by, and some wich have it don't work right.
If possible, make it more stable than Datel's Very Happy

3. Wherever possible, emulate all CIC variants so it is a really universal cart.

4. This one is more a question than anythig else. Long ago I read somewhere that ActionReplay's cart parallel port could be used not only to read/write codes from a PC, and maybe transfer saves, but also loading code on the console, or communicating with it in real-time or something... I'm not sure about that, nor what did it serve for, but it sounds interesting.

Finally, even if it's been said thousands of times for years, make it as soon as possible, fans are waiting for it! Wink
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