evolvingconsole

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.

Features list taken from StoneAgeGamer

• FRAM for game saves (no battery required)
• Max supported ROM size is 8Mbit (1Mbyte)
• Sega Master System and SG-1000 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

• NES, Famicom, and Twin Famicom systems are supported.* Many NES/FC clones supported as well.
• Cart supports NES and FDS ROM images.
• Automatic disk side swap for FDS.
• Expansion audio.**
• Game Genie cheat code support.
• Automatically backs-up saves to SD card. There is no need to push reset before shutting down the system.†
• Mapper support can be extended via software updates. As easy as loading new mappers files on SD card.
• FAT / FAT16 / FAT32 file system formats are supported.
• Supports SD (SD & SDHC) cards up to 32GB.
• Quick loading of game files (approx. 4-8 seconds).

• Powerful Cyclone II FPGA.
• 2 x 512Kbyte SRAM for PRG and CHR data.
• 128Kbyte battery backed memory. It write save data to SD.
• Max II CPLD to handle FPGA reconfiguration, BIOS, SD and USB interfaces.
• 1Mbyte flash BIOS.
• Voltage shift buffers on PPU and CPU bus for matching levels between 5v NES bus and 3.3 EverDrive bus. Far better than simple resistor buffers at reducing noise and power consumption.

I got frustrated with wanting to play some SNES games and finding out that my Super Everdrive could not play them due to the needed enhancement chips. Commence ordering the SD2SNES from StoneAgeGamer.

Features list taken from StoneAgeGamer

• SD/SDHC/SDXC support (tested up to 64GB; no exFAT support so SDXC cards must be reformatted using FAT32)
• High quality push-push memory card slot
• Fast ROM loading (~9MB/s)
• Fast menu navigation
• Directories are sorted automatically, no need for FAT sorting tools
• High resolution menu (512×224) for adequate display of long file names
• Real Time Clock
• Supports ROM size up to 128MBit (96Mbit actually implemented)
• Automatic near-time SRAM saving to SD Card (while the game runs). Some limitations apply:
  • near-time saving is switched to periodic saving when a game is found to use the SRAM as work RAM.
  • Automatic saving is disabled when MSU1 is used. SRAM is saved on reset.
• Enhancement chip support (see below for implementation status)
  • BS-X memory map / Satellaview base unit registers (clock)
  • DSP1 / 1b
  • DSP2
  • DSP3
  • DSP4
  • ST-010
  • Cx4
  • MSU1 (Each supported enhancement chip can be used in conjunction with MSU1.)
  • S-RTC
• SuperCIC key (SNES CIC clone):
  • enables operation on unmodified consoles of all regions
  • supports software 50/60Hz switching on SuperCIC enhanced consoles only (to be performed by sd2snes firmware, not yet implemented there)
• Auto region patching: eliminates “This Game Pak is not designed…” messages regardless of 50/60Hz setting

This is to replace my loved SuperCard MiniSD. Many hours of Advanced Wars have been played on my SuperCard over the years. Recently I wanted to update the ROMs on my MiniSD and found that the software was just as wonky as I remembered it and had trouble with some of the later GBA games. It all came down to playing Final Fantasy 6 and putting in 6 hours and finding out my save was corrupted to help push me to the Everdrive GBA. The Everdrive GBA is dead simple to get up and running, just add games to a MicroSD and boot. I know this is like beating a dead horse but I wish the size of the cart was of a standard GBA game like my SuperCard… but that said, this thing is awesome.