MD Flash cart Experiments

[Jeffrey]

Ok. I have a few ideas for the TOTEK flash cart. I haven't been able to try them for various reasons. So I want to know if any of you have tried these things and what the results are:

1. Using Blockbuster flash carts on the Totek adaptor. Would it work? Anyone with those old rental carts ever try this? It should use the same method of flashing...

2. Plugging the flash into a Powerbase convertor. I am thinking: load an sms rom to the flash cart and plug it into the powerbase convertor. Will the SMS game run?

3. Demos. It seems that many demos that work on the emulators do not run on the flash cart. What's up with that?

P.S. Still looking for a working image of Super Bubble Bobble MD. I am starting to suspect that the game never existed. All of the images floating around are demo-like corrupt files....

 

[cypher-s]

I used to read as many import reviews as possible when I was a megadrive addicted kid and I don't remember ever coming across a review of super bubble bobble, although of course I could've missed its release.

 

[Mask of Destiny]

1. Using Blockbuster flash carts on the Totek adaptor. Would it work? Anyone with those old rental carts ever try this? It should use the same method of flashing...

Definately won't work. The flash chip in the Tototek carts is controlled by a custom programmed FPGA. There is no way the interface is going to be the same.

2. Plugging the flash into a Powerbase convertor. I am thinking: load an sms rom to the flash cart and plug it into the powerbase convertor. Will the SMS game run?

The cartridge isn't going to fit into a powerbase converter; however, I think it very likely that the cartridge will work in SMS mode provided there's only one game on the cart so you don't need to use the menu. You just need to short a certain pin to ground and the machine will boot into SMS mode.

3. Demos. It seems that many demos that work on the emulators do not run on the flash cart. What's up with that?

You can get away with things on an emulator that you can't get away with on the real hardware. Emu authors usually only make their emulators more accurate in ways that will help compatability with real games. Making sure that poorly coded demos don't work is usually not a priority.

 

[ExCyber]

SMS games are also only going to work if they're 48K or less; anything larger needs a mapper.