Current state of Genny dev carts?

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djcouchycouch
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Current state of Genny dev carts?

Post by djcouchycouch » Fri Aug 07, 2020 4:51 am

Hi there,

I have an almost 10 year old plain Jane Everdrive for my Genesis. It works perfectly fine but I’m getting real tired of swapping out and copying to SD cards all the time. I’m a simple man with a basic want of plugging to a cart through USB but the current Everdrives are honkin’ expensive. The X7 is 250$ CAD on amazon which I’m having a hard time justifying. Is there anything out there that can do that (And nothing else) but cheaper? I don’t need anything fancy.

Thanks!
djcc

cero
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Re: Current state of Genny dev carts?

Post by cero » Fri Aug 07, 2020 7:09 am

No.

djcouchycouch
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Re: Current state of Genny dev carts?

Post by djcouchycouch » Fri Aug 07, 2020 9:14 pm

Thanks cero! Looks like I'll be picking up cans on the side of the road for a while to get an X7 :)

cero
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Re: Current state of Genny dev carts?

Post by cero » Sat Aug 08, 2020 7:20 am

Remember the -20% discount on black friday.

themrcul
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Re: Current state of Genny dev carts?

Post by themrcul » Mon Aug 17, 2020 12:43 am

I was in the same situation couchy,
It was painful swapping out the SD card, copy, eject, insert into everdrive clone, then wait to flash, then play.

I got an Everdrive X7 and haven't looked back. Yes it is expensive, but I justified it on account of wanting to make games well.
The USB connection works great and is very reliable. I've even written some tools to work through the USB connection that helps my artist preview art on a CRT while working.

That being said my outside work hours have been smashed for more than a year with extra projects that are not as much fun and not Mega Drive related which is a shame!

ob1
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Re: Current state of Genny dev carts?

Post by ob1 » Thu Mar 18, 2021 6:29 am

Thanks to themrcul who allowed me to copy paste an exchange we've had on PM :


Hi Olivier,
Thanks for your message. I am delighted with my x7 pro. Yes, you can send through roms from the computer to the Mega Drive through the USB port, and it is blazing fast.
Therefore if you are making a game you can automate in Visual Studio or whatever build process you use to call the program that sends ROMs to the Mega Everdrive and send the ROM over after building.
Not only that, but if you look at some of Krizz's examples you can communicate with the Mega Drive in your game while it is running to send debug information back/forward, update variables, whatever you define! From memory (and I'm not on my home computer sorry so I don't remember exactly, but as long as in your ROM header you set the rom type as "SSF" or something, the Mega Everdrive will change it's internal mode to listen for messages through the USB port while your ROM is running. It's amazing.

The only thing is, once a ROM is playing, you are no longer in the main menu of the Mega Everdrive and so it is not "listening" for the computer to request a ROM transfer and so it will not work unless you hit the physical RESET button on the Mega Drive to send it back to the main menu from which it will be listening again.

Additionally the default C# project code that Krizz wrote is slightly slower as it searches through each COM port on the computer until it gets a response from the Mega Everdrive and then negotiates sending through the ROM. I know which COM port the Mega Everdrive is plugged up to so for my version it is blazing fast from request to ROM running.

Once my engine is further along I plan on putting a message type in the debug version of the game I am making that will listen for an "update" call or whatever and either soft reset the Mega Drive to be ready to send the ROM again or (hopefully if possible), just overwrite the ROM while it is running and then soft reboot the game again. We'll see if that is possible but at least soft-resetting will be a huge help to development iteration.

So, in short, yes what you are hoping to do is possible and it is exactly what I am doing.

I wish you the very best with your project. I have recently taken up development of my engine again after 3 long years of not being able to do anything on it due to lack of time, and I am enjoying it immensely when I get a chance to work on it!

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