Multicart Portable Question, and Dr. V64

[Busterblade]

So, I am thinking about portables that I could make. Many of them are cartridge based, such as the old Ninty and Sega consoles. I want to be able to play the games that I legally own on any portables I build. However, it would be nice to have a way to flash them all onto a single cart, or even a special disc or flash card, so I can save space on the portables.

Seeing as how NES and SNES carts (for example) are huge, fragile, and wasteful of space, I would like to have a small device, such as a flash drive, to copy them all onto. I am looking for these devices for any systems that have them, so reccommend whatever you can think of. I read something about a Dr. V64 on these forums, but a Google search yielded little info, other than telling me that a Dr. V64 Jr. exists. So is this item what I am looking for?

My ideal setup would be an ultracompact portable with a built in, or at least internally concealed, device with the games on it, with a cable to copy the games from the unwieldy cartridges. BTW, I am not looking for emulator-type devices, I want the games absolutely unmodified, just with them all together for portability's sake.

EDIT: Possibly building a device is an option, but I mean building as in putting components together, not programming something.

[marshallh]

The V64 and its little cousin the Jr. are not what you're looking for - the V64 is CD-based an is huge, while the Jr. only stores one game at a time.

Neoflash is (supposedly) working on a N64 flash cart which is just what you're looking for. It takes SD cards and doesn' t look bigger than a regular cart. But of course, it hasn't been released yet.

Ideally, you would have an SD-based device with 32-64MB of DRAM so when a game was selected the contents would be copied from the SD card into the DRAM. This would require both an advanced microcontroller and an FPGA for refreshing the DRAM/interfacing to the N64 cart slot.

Your best bet is to wait - unless you want to help me build that functionality into the n64 flash cart I'm making


For a NES multicart - there are so many mappers and memory configurations that making a multicart would be very difficult. Best to get a pirate multicart and hope it has what you want.

The SNES would be marginally easier, but so many games used special helper chips in the physical cartridge (like the DSP-1, SuperFX) that is a big problem. Tototek makes one-game flash carts, though not cheaply.

[timmeh87]

why not sram. all the gba/nds ones seem to use sram. more expensive so what.

[Busterblade]

Okay. thanks marshallh. I would help you if I could, but I have no skill in programming. So, what I think I might do instead is open up the cartridges for NES and SNES, and then make smaller custom cases for them. If you have ever seen the insides of those carts, there is an insane amount of empty space. So I could easily compact them. Then again, maybe I will just go fullsize after all.

[Busterblade]

Sram?