NEO MD flash cart lite first impressions

cdoty · Post by **cdoty** » Mon Jul 02, 2007 7:59 pm

Kaneda had posted about this flash cartridge in another thread on this forum. I was suprised to find that it was $50 including shipping.

The cartridge is very light, and probably made out of cheaper plastic, but the construction looks very professional. The supplied cable includes a parallel port connector and a USB connector for power. I had to use a USB extension, because the USB cable is too short to reach a USB port. If you have a USB port near the parallel port, this wouldn't be a problem. I wasn't able to find the transfer program on the included CD, and had to download the software from the Neo Team website. The transfer software only supports the BIN format, but an easy to use SMDtoBin utility is included. The program worked flawlessly under Windows XP with a bulit in parallel port.

The cartridge supports the Genesis and 32x systems, and does work on US systems with a little modification or use of a Game Genie cartridge. It may be possible to replace the Japanese style case, but I didn't try this. There is no way to lock a cartridge to any region; it's just the shape of the cartridge that matters. There are some games that are locked to a region, the flash cartridge can't help in this situation.

The 32x was the easiest to modify, as the harder plastic made the tabs easy to snap off. Once the tabs were broken off, the cartridge slipped in without any problems.

The Genesis was more difficult as the plastic is softer and requires scraping away. The Genesis also has a thinner port making it a tight squeeze to get the cartridge in. The Game Genie works without any changes, but requires pressing that start button twice to get into the game.

The Nomad is almost as easy as the 32x, but the softer plastic makes it a bit harder to remove the rounded corners.

The cartridge doesn't support stuff like multiple roms on a cartridge or cheat codes, but works nicely as a development cartridge. The cartridge uses the parallel port to transfer software, like every other flash cartridge available. This is slow, and the cartridge must be erased before the rom is transferred. The program shows that it takes 80 seconds to erase the cartridge. It erases the entire cartridge each time. The transfer of my Frog Feast game, which is 256K, took about 15 seconds. The connection port on the cartridge is partially covered when in the system. It could probably be programmed in the system, using a Game Genie cartridge. This should only be done with the system powered off.

I successfully used the following roms with the cartridge:
After Burner Complete 32x (Japanese/US)
Space Harrier 32x (US)
WWF Wrestlemania Arcade 32x (World) - 32 Mbit game
Cool Spot (US)
Championship RC Pro Am (US)
Puyo Puyo (Japanese)
Frog Feast (Multi region)

I had no problems with any of them.

I could not get NBA Jam Tournament Edition for the 32X to work. I tried two different file. It could be a bad dump.

Post by **KanedaFr** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 7:37 am

yup,
I talked about the 3in1 we're waiting for +1 year now
no more usb only SD Card

but I don't know if Neo is really trustable....
for ex, they released a "new" FC/SFC console which is only a old clone sold some years ago with their logo on it

Fonzie · Post by **Fonzie** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 10:34 am

From my sources, the flash cart they are selling are made in a china factory and sold localy (to chinese ppl) for 15usd... So its definitively not from neoflash, they are just resellers.

I would be glad to cutout megacart price to 50usd then ^^, but it is already 60 for this board members :'(, I don't know what to do anymore...

TmEE co.(TM) · Post by **TmEE co.(TM)** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 11:33 am

And I thought that my cart is slow (12sec for erase, 5mins for 4MB ROM), it is as slow as NeoFlash after some calculations.
And Fonz, I'd buy MegaCart, but I have no MCD and no means to pay... reason why I build everything myself.

8bitwizard · Post by **8bitwizard** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 3:01 pm

I'll stick with my 16 megabit Multi Game Hunter and emulators for development. And my EPROM boards for carts that I can carry around to show off (on a Nomad of course).

Post by **KanedaFr** » Tue Jul 03, 2007 8:35 pm

same thing here....my SMD is enought for me

cdoty · Post by **cdoty** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:31 am

Fonzie wrote:From my sources, the flash cart they are selling are made in a china factory and sold localy (to chinese ppl) for 15usd... So its definitively not from neoflash, they are just resellers.

I would be glad to cutout megacart price to 50usd then ^^, but it is already 60 for this board members :'(, I don't know what to do anymore...

Yep, they sell for $19 in quanties of 10 or $15 in quantities of 100. So, there's a pretty good markup for single ones.

8bitwizard wrote:I'll stick with my 16 megabit Multi Game Hunter and emulators for development. And my EPROM boards for carts that I can carry around to show off (on a Nomad of course).

I have a Romulator, but ISA PCs are almost useless now. I also have an EPROM cartridge. It was time for something easier to use and something that would work on a 32x.

8bitwizard · Post by **8bitwizard** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 4:02 am

cdoty wrote:I could not get NBA Jam Tournament Edition for the 32X to work. I tried two different file. It could be a bad dump.

I don't know about Tournament Edition 32X, but the regular NBA Jam uses an I2C EEPROM, which the flash cart almost certainly doesn't have.

The good news is that there probably aren't more than 20 games which used I2C EEPROM, and maybe another 10 more that used other weird stuff like 28C16 EEPROM and Sonic 3's MRAM.

Jorge Nuno · Post by **Jorge Nuno** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 1:32 pm

Sonic3 RAM may be intimidating but its just like a normal static RAM, but they decided do go the no-battery way and threw in a nonvolatile RAM from ramtron

If you have a full range flash (0~4MB) sonic3 alone will probably save in the upper 2MB even without the fancy decoders and logic but if it is sonic3 & knuckles will overwrite the sonic3 rom, corrupting it, but I think that it wont affect the combined game: I think it saves on top of sonic3 header and initialization code

8bitwizard · Post by **8bitwizard** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 2:13 pm

Jorge Nuno wrote:Sonic3 RAM may be intimidating but its just like a normal static RAM, but they decided do go the no-battery way and threw in a nonvolatile RAM from ramtron

If you have a full range flash (0~4MB) sonic3 alone will probably save in the upper 2MB even without the fancy decoders and logic but if it is sonic3 & knuckles will overwrite the sonic3 rom, corrupting it, but I think that it wont affect the combined game: I think it saves on top of sonic3 header and initialization code

You can't write to flash like it was RAM. You have to switch the chip into command mode (at which point none of it will return code or data, so you need to be running from RAM), then you have to erase a block (which will probably be 64K bytes) and reprogram it.

It's possible that the designer of the board put in some kind of RAM access detect on any write to the cartridge, and saved the high address bits, but even that won't run full 32Mbit carts like PSIV and Beyond Oasis, which bank switch the RAM into the ROM area. Or maybe theres a configuration chip that the loader can change. Or it's only a 16Mbit cart and the RAM is fixed at 200000.

The good news is that only a few MD games deviated from ROM-only or ROM+RAM@200000. It's a lot harder to make a generic NES flash cart, with its plethora of mappers.

Jorge Nuno · Post by **Jorge Nuno** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 2:26 pm

You cant just select flash (CS), especify addresses, give data and activate WE?

Looking at a 29LV160 datasheet from MX, iI didn't see no write timing diagram except for that command register... At the moment I can only program memories using the classic method, since I use a 2-stage 12bit counter at the adresses

All small flashes I have can be written this way, just like SRAM or UVeprom

TmEE co.(TM) · Post by **TmEE co.(TM)** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 2:41 pm

I don't know... programming a Flash is total pain, at least on MD on its own, code must be in RAM, as if it would have been executed from ROM, you'd mess up command sequences (unless all data, address and control lines are separated from the buses when you're not accessing the chip).

Edit: code must not be in RAM, chip is not active when you don't access it...

Jorge Nuno · Post by **Jorge Nuno** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 2:49 pm

If that command register is required to program then yes it is impossimble to program flash from flash without running code from ram or from another memory that is not the one that will be written
But if it is just Addresses,CS,data and WE it is possible...

thats what sonic3 does: runs code from 0~1FFFFFh, pulses /TIME that maps FRAM on top of nothing and saves in 200000...

S3K runs from 0~1FFFFFh, acesses sonic3 rom at 200000~3FFFFFh for some data and pulses /TIME mapping sonic3 FRAM in the place of sonic3 ROM then saves

EDIT Forget the above, in the 29LV160TTC-90 datasheet [p28] there is the usual write cycle of a memory YUUUUUPIIIII

I think I use this one for testing bigones, for ultra small progams I'm using a 32K*8 SRAM that is converted to 16bit by a pair of registers

8bitwizard · Post by **8bitwizard** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 7:05 pm

Jorge Nuno wrote:If that command register is required to program then yes it is impossimble to program flash from flash without running code from ram or from another memory that is not the one that will be written
But if it is just Addresses,CS,data and WE it is possible...

But it's not. Trust me, I know, I actually wrote flash programming code for a previous job. (the code already copied itself into RAM on startup because it was faster than ROM, so that made it a little easier)

There may be a few flash chips in which the whole chip doesn't read as one big status register during programming, but that's how all of them that I've seen work.

Fonzie · Post by **Fonzie** » Fri Jul 06, 2007 7:30 pm

Yeah, flash chip aren't easy to deal with (especially handling various write/erase errors)

But, it is actually a powerful media ^^.

Its a bit sad that the minimum sector size is usually 128KB because you cannot store temporary the sector in genesis RAM order to edit one byte on it and write it back ... I never saw big flash chip that would let you erase only one byte, strange ^^

For Megacart, I have to run from RAM, making the software very tricky to develop (a software that copy & run another software that copy & run another software LOL)...

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NEO MD flash cart lite first impressions

NEO MD flash cart lite first impressions

Re: NEO MD flash cart lite first impressions