Flash Cart
Neo SD Loader
CD emulators are getting more popular as we are seeing them for Saturn, Dreamcast and Sega CD, to name a few. Why not one for the Neo-Geo CD? The Neo-Geo CD top loader is known for being notoriously SLOW when loading data off of the CD due to its 1X read speeds. This is a shame since there are some decent games that never made it on the AES/MVS platform. The Neo SD Loader was exactly what I needed to solve this problem. It has a slick interface/frontend to choose what ISO to start and speeds up the read times to 4X, a HUGE difference. This was a pretty straight forward mod, but there was a pin of a SMD IC that needed to be unsoldered and pulled away from the board. So this might not be for the unexperienced with SDM soldering.
NeoGeo Pocket SD
I have been following SainT’s projects over at AtariAge forums and here is another perfect solution for playing your NeoGeo Pocket roms on original hardware.
Here is his forum post on it over at AtariAge
Great build quality and glad to have it in my collection. I look forward to SainT’s other flash carts in the near future.
Firmware updates are posted at http://www.retrohq.co.uk/
Atari Lynx Flash Cart
Been waiting for this one for some time. This is a great microSD to Atari Lynx flash cart made by RetroHQ and there is a wait list for the at the moment that he’s catching up on pretty quickly.
This cart will work in the model 1 & 2 lynx handhelds. He makes a case/shell for it but when fitted with the shell it will not fit in the model 1. I opted for the non shell version since I own both models and not sure what one will be used more with this cart.
RetroHQ tossed in a 1gb SD card that he had the latest menu software on it. I tossed a couple roms on it to test with and it worked with no issues at all. I did find out that the sound is out on my model 2 Lynx… so time to fix that.
SD2Vita
With the Sony Vita getting a full blown CFW (HENkaku Enso) I now have a need for more storage space more than ever. The Vita has an overpriced proprietary memory card that only goes up to 64GB. With the vita game sizes, we need the ability to have larger capacity cards. In comes the SD2Vita PCB. This PCB gives you the ability to use a microSD card and insert it into the Vita game card slot. You then need to load a driver with HENkaku Enso to mount this as usable storage. A very easy mod and well worth the effort.
I ordered the PCBs from PCBWAY and it cost about $15 shipped for 5 PCBs. I then ordered the micrSD slots from Amazon for about $2.
Harmony Cart
Information: Taken form the Harmony manual.
The Harmony cartridge is a programmable add-on for the Atari 2600 console that allows you
to load an entire library of games into a single cartridge and then select which title you want to
play from a friendly, on-screen menu interface. It features an SD card interface, making it simple
to access the large library of Atari 2600 software. The Harmony cartridge supports almost all of
the titles that have been produced for the Atari 2600. It can also be used to run your own Atari
2600 game creations on a real console. The Harmony cartridge is flash-upgradeable, and will be
updated to support future Atari 2600 developments.
I have not had time to play around with it yet but soon enough I will be playing some combat on a 13″ tube TV and loving every minute of it.
EverDrive-GG
Features list taken from StoneAgeGamer
Features:
- FRAM for game saves (no battery required)
- Max supported ROM size is 8Mbit (1Mbyte)
- GameGear and SMS games are supported
- Save RAM data can be stored or loaded from the SD card
- Cartridge also can be used on Game Gear via the Master Gear Converter
- Codemasters and Sega mappers are supported
- SD/SDHC cards supported up to 32Gb
- FAT32 support
SD2IEC
The SD2IEC is a mass storage device using an SD memory card and interfacing with the IEC bus of the Commodore 64. This little guy can replace a need for cartridges, tape drives or disk drives. When you choose a SD card for the SD2IEC, the smaller the better due to some limitations. I went with an old 1GB card I had laying around and it worked perfectly. I tried a 64GB and had issues reading the card. You need to format the card with FAT32.
Next your going to want to download CBM-FileBrowser and put it on the root of the SD memory card. This makes it so much easier to browse all the disk/tape images on the SD card.
Flashboy +
Here is a flash cart for a system that does not get that much attention. This is for the Nintendo Virtual Boy.
This is a standard Virtual Boy cartridge with a mini USB port on it. This is for writing roms to the 16 MBits (2 MBytes) internal flash memory. The down side is, it only holds one game at a time. This is a bit of a let down since I am so used to the Everdrives carts which are some sort of SD/microSD and can hold a whole library. To load a game to the Flashboy + you will need to use the supplied loader software and connect the mini USB cable to your PC. This is a pretty simple & straight forward task.
The cart does not have a backup battery so games like Galactic Pinball and VB Wario Land are playable, but can not take advantage of the battery.
Normally I open up the carts to take pictures of but I am not wanting to break the superglue that holds this 3D printed case together. I will will pop it open in the future and update this post.