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| | Manuel Pazos announces MultiROM and new MegaFlashROM SCC cartridges |
| | Sunday, October 22, 2006 - 01:45 Submitted by: Guillian Topic: Hardware | | During the next MSX user meeting in Barcelona, which is to be held on December 9th, Manuel Pazos will release three new hardware products: a new edition of the MegaFlashROM SCC and two new types of MultiROM cartridges.
The new MegaFlashROM SCC, which will go on sale for approximately 60 euros, is the result of looking for a way of making new MegaFlashROMs SCC without using original Konami games. To achieve this, Manuel Pazos developed a new board to build them using only new components. This new production has encouraged MSX developers such as Nerlaska, who recently announced to enter the MSXdev'06 competition, to consider releasing their new ROM games on real cartridges. Due to this demand, the design of the board has been altered to support both ordinary and MegaROM games. The result are two types of MultiROM cartdiges which will be demonstrated and released during the MSX user meeting in Barcelona : - Basic cartridge (non MegaROM, up to 64kB) - On sale for approximately 10 euro
- SCC cartridge (MegaROM, up to 512kB with Konami SCC mapper and SCC sound chip) - On sale for approximately 18 euros
As an extra promotion, Manuel Pazos will release a game compilation cartridge which for only 10 euros, which will include several games. Two projects, both MSXdev'06 entries have already been announced to be included in this cartridge: Operation Wolf and Traffic Jam, an MSX1 game currently in development by Imanok. Other titles that will be included in this release have not been announced yet. The final sale prices might differ slightly, depending on the production quantity. If you want to be one of the first to get your hands on one of these cartridges, make sure you are in Barcelona on December 9th.
Relevant link: Manuel Pazos |
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| By poke-1,170 on October 22 2006, 06:52 | ehmm, so a remake of the SCC chip? quite cool actually
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| By Patsie on October 22 2006, 09:42 | wow this sounds great! new cartridges with SSC for only 18 euro?! Both Matra (for their cartridges) and Manuel Pazos deserve a big round of applause for their new achiefments! Now let the new games be produced! 
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| By wolf_ on October 22 2006, 11:18 | I guess this is the classic SCC, rite? Not the SCC+ or something..
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| By msd on October 22 2006, 11:38 | What did you use to make a SCC? A FPGA?
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| By Edwin on October 22 2006, 12:09 | I doubt you can get an fpga board for E18,-. But I wouldn't be surprised if you can still get those chips somewhere since Konami used them for more than just MSX cartridges.
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| By Guillian on October 22 2006, 12:54 | I use the classic SCC
Tsujikawa proposed to do it using an FPGA to support both SCC and SCC-I (SCC+) and ASCII8/16 mappers. But since I wanted to do it as cheap as possible I decided to use the old SCC chips.
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| By wolf_ on October 22 2006, 13:11 | how many of those chips are left?
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| By msd on October 22 2006, 13:31 | The old SCC chips? You can still get them? (and I don't mean ripping them from a konami cartridge)
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| By Guillian on October 22 2006, 17:15 | I got them from a electronic components supplier. I'm not sure about how many SCCs are in stock all around the world, but there should be a lot of them yet.
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| By poke-1,170 on October 22 2006, 17:20 | so, an empty cartridge with SCC could also be used for composing ?
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| By msd on October 22 2006, 17:48 | That those chips are still available and why didn't anybody think of this before. 
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| By Grauw on October 22 2006, 19:57 | This is a great development! Much better than ‘butchering’ Konami cartridges .
~Grauw
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| By Sonic_aka_T on October 22 2006, 20:53 | *tries to glue Solid Snake back together*
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| By Guillian on October 22 2006, 21:11 | >so, an empty cartridge with SCC could also be used for composing ?
Yes. You can also use a MegaFlashROM SCC as an empty cartridge or just prevent the ROM from booting and use the SCC alone.
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| By wolf_ on October 23 2006, 00:29 | guillian: I've some issues with sending emails due recent lack of internet (I'm between internet subscriptions so to say), the answer on your question is 'yes, you may'.
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| By poke-1,170 on October 23 2006, 02:58 | no more konami cart butchering hahaha
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| By ro on October 23 2006, 08:57 | how 'bout sticking 2 of them SCC's on one board for 10 channels of SCC
neh, nevermind. the original will do just fine!!
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| By Guillian on October 23 2006, 10:32 | Wolf: Great!
Ro: I had the same idea and talked to a friend about that. He said "Are you crazy?". I think it can be done changing the mapping address of the second SCC. But it would need an special music editor
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| By wolf_ on October 23 2006, 11:20 | Quote:
| But it would need an special music editor
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We could support 2 scc's I think, at least trackerwise, since I do our music in Impulse Tracker! Dunno about performance tho. Also, memorywise it's a bit tricky, twice the data!
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| By Bastiaan on October 23 2006, 12:29 | Execellent project, excellent value for money!
Any photos of this project?
Any distributor in Holland?
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| By Guillian on October 23 2006, 15:26 | There is no distributors in Holland. If someone is interested, please contact directly with me.
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| By dvik on October 23 2006, 19:38 | What type of flash chip is used in these carts?
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| By sunrise on October 23 2006, 22:38 | Have just sent an email to you guillian.
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| By Guillian on October 24 2006, 02:16 | dvik: I use AM29F040B (4Mb) to keep the compatibility with the old MegaFlashROMs and OPF (the program that flashes the ROM)
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| By dvik on October 24 2006, 07:54 | Guillian: I gnow its a bit late, but how hard would it be to switch to an intel strata instead? The reason why I'm asking is that the AMD prorgramming sequence requires writes to several different addresses. Vincent van Dam's Gamereader tool can easily be modified to flash the flash cart but it is very slow to do random access writes with the Gamereader. I tried with the padial flash cart and it takes almost an hour to flash while my ESE ram can be flashed in about a second (I'm not kidding, the difference is that big).
But its really nice to be able to flash the cartridge from the PC. Thats one of the reasons I like the Gamereader so much.
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| By Guillian on October 24 2006, 11:39 | dvik:
Indeed it is a bit too late 
I understand your problem. I had a very similar one. I developed a cartridge reader/writer for PC (by parallel port) that used two counters IC to address the memory. It was quite fast reading cartridges and writing SRAM, but very slow flashing MegaFlashROM due to the writing algorithm. Then I changed the counters ICs with shift registers ICs and it was faster. Finally I decided to use 8bit buffer ICs and now it is quite fast. It takes a few seconds to flash 512K.
It also can identify the inserted cartridge using BlueMSX database ^^!
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| By Bastiaan on October 24 2006, 12:26 | Does the SCC/ ROM cartridge have a switch to stop the rom from booting and use SCC only?
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| By Guillian on October 24 2006, 13:11 | Yes, MegaFlashROM SCC has a switch buttom to prevent the ROM booting.
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| By Imanok on October 25 2006, 09:28 | By the way... when posting this news, you have skipped some important info about Operation Wolf version included in the cartridge.
This is Operation Wolf Extended version: A new version of the game that includes all the missing extras (mouse support, map, intro, in-game secuences, etc...)
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| By Bastiaan on October 25 2006, 20:57 | I wonder if nemesis_1_scc + twinbee_scc + gamemaster would work in a megarom scc :-)
Or: Nemesis_1_scc + gamemaster would that work?
Does anyone know or have the hardware to test this?
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| By Guillian on October 26 2006, 01:12 | You can make multiROMs with several games in the cartridge ( http://soft.mundivia.es/mpazos/flashrom/multi.jpg)
Also you can simulate Konami combinations and use GameMaster 2 with other games using only one MegaFlashROM (http://soft.mundivia.es/mpazos/flashrom/GM2-PACK.png)
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| By dvik on October 26 2006, 07:18 | Guillian: Since I doubt the gamereader can be modified to better work as a flash tool I think your option sounds like the way to go. Are you planning to sell cart loaders or do you have instructions on how to make one? It would be great to have while developing MSX apps.
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| By Guillian on October 26 2006, 10:56 | dvik: My idea was to publish the scheme in the next number of CALL MSX magazine. But I was busy with the cartridges project, so I had no time to write an article. Probably in the next number I'll do it.
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| By SaebaMSX on October 26 2006, 11:56 | It is decided that next number (not the one which will be sold during the next Barcelona MSX meeting) will be in English. It will be a very special number.
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| By Edwin on October 26 2006, 12:03 | Are these flash roms capable of handling th 48KB roms? Or any other roms that use page 0 or even page 3?
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| By Guillian on October 26 2006, 12:11 | Edwin: Yes, the Basic cartridge can handle ROMs up to 64k, from #0000 to #FFFF
MegaFlashROM SCC can handle ROMs also in #0000-#FFFF, but you will need some tricks to run a 48k ROM
[EDITED]
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| By Grauw on October 27 2006, 09:44 | Saeba: cool! It would be nice if you can find someone to distribute it in the Netherlands, too (in September ).
~Grauw
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| By manuel on March 31 2007, 14:43 | I got my MegaFLashROM SCC via Sunrise, and it actually ROCKS! Great work!!
How about that scheme, guillian?
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| By Guillian on April 03 2007, 11:24 | Thanks!
About the cartridge reader scheme. I should find some time to write the article, or just send it to some MSX CALL member (Zanac2?) with some knowledge about electronic and let him to write it
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| By hamalech on July 10 2007, 16:21 | Where buy SCC (K051649) component?
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| By djh1697 on July 19 2007, 07:28 | I have ordered and paid for a MegaFlashROM SCC 
There is an excellent review on the Msxhan website.
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| By manuel on July 19 2007, 09:13 | What website is that??
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