Nes/Snes powerpaks

[Bloodandbourbon]

i saw on retrozone the karts you can dump roms on and play... but i find the kinda expensive. is there any cheaper ones out there for sale?

[Hatta]

Nope, as far as I know the NES Powerpak is the only flash device for the NES. There is an SNES flash cart produced by Neo Flash. But it's just as expensive as the Powerpak, and less desirable as it uses proprietary storage.

Really, these things are bargains for what they do. You'd pay $50 for a repro anyway. If you'd ever want more than two repros, you're better off going for a flash cart.

If you want some cheaper flash devices, I can only think of a few. There's the Harmony cart for the 2600 that goes for $60-70. The SIO2SD for Atari XL/XE you can find for $60. You can also get a CF7+ for a TI99/4a for $40-50. These are cheaper because they can take advantage of existing chips. More expensive cards like the PowerPaks, or the Neo Myth all contain FPGAs which adds to the cost.


My advice is to save up. Flash carts are expensive, but they're worth it.

Edit: I forgot about the tototek SNES cards. They use parallel and only hold 4 games. Don't bother.

[Ziggy]

Yeah, flash carts WILL pay for themselves if you use them enough. For the SNES, the usual limitations are games that used special chips (Super FX chip in Star Fox, S-DD1 Street Fighter Alpha/Star Ocean, CX4 in Mega Man X2 and 3, etc).

ToToTEK sells a flash cart for the SNES, and it's a lot cheaper than the Retro Zone cart...

http://www.tototek.com/store/index.php? ... ucts_id=39

....though it's a little limited when compared to Retro Zone's cart. There are some benefits of the ToToTEK cart though. One being that you get a programmer with the flash cart (what you use to flash the ROMs onto the cart) which can also be used to dump your own games to ROMs, read the save data from your carts or flash carts, and write save data to your carts or flash cart. This is an awesome tool to have, for that reason.

I own a Tototek cart, and it's pretty good. I've been meaning to pick up a NES and SNES flash cart from Retro Zone as well, but they are pretty expensive. Anyways, I know the Tototek website is in Engrish and doesn't explain the products too well, so let me know if you have any questions about it.

[Satoshi_Matrix]

I own both NES and SNES Powerpaks and have to say they are fantastic additions.

I own a huge library of not only NES, but also Famicom games. To be able to play every game I own, every game I don't, every hack, every translation and every homebrew all on one package that plays on the real hardware is like a dream. Oh, and it also plays Famicom Disk System games without the crazy load times and the dreaded error messages. The cherry on top? It also plays .nsf files too. $135 may sound like a lot, but this thing can single handedly save you literally thousands of dollars you would otherwise spend tracking down each game on their own, and still not be able to play all the hacks and homebrew this offers. There are still some mappers not yet supported (namely MMC5) but the Powerpak CAN do them and eventually will with future updates.


The SNES Powerpak is a bit of a different story. It lacks the more advanced chips used in later games, most notably the Super FX chip, so notable omissions include Star Fox, Star Fox 2 Yoshi's Island and Super Mario RPG. That said, is this pak still worth it?

Say you want the system's best RPGs. Go to ebay right now and look to see what it would cost to buy Secret of Mana, Final Fantasy VI, and EarthBound. Now considering that, is $140 for almost every SNES and Super Famicom game ever made really that expensive?

[Bloodandbourbon]

hmm i do want the nes one.... i've been using my r4 card on my ds, but its just not the same. i do want it, maybe i'll pick one up soon.

i'm just dont see why no company has made karts like the retrozone powerpaks. i dont really think nintendo would hunt them down and kill them like they do with the r4 cards.

[Bloodandbourbon]

wait! do they have one for Sega gen???

[Ziggy]

You should check out this site more, they have flash carts for MANY systems and some other cool stuff as well.

http://www.tototek.com/store/index.php? ... ucts_id=59

^ There's their Genesis flash cart. They also have a $60 version with only 32Mbit of storage.

And also, you should search the forum a little. There's a pretty big thread for the SNES PowerPak that contains a lot of info about it. Also, there's a thread about Genesis flash carts with lots of links.

[Hatta]

The NES is hard to do because of all the mappers. Getting close to the level of compatibility that the PowerPak has is an amazing achievement.

Probably the best value for the Genesis right now is the Everdrive. It uses SD and runs Genesis/SMS/32X roms. There's also a Neo Flash cart for the genesis, but it's a lot more expensive for just a few more features (sega cd sram, FM sound for SMS, and that's about it I think).

[Satoshi_Matrix]

I just don't see why no company has made carts like the retrozone powerpaks.

There are three main reasons:
1. Demand is relatively low
2. Building any electronics from scratch and producing them is expensive.
3. Doing it well is very difficult.

The Powerpaks are extremely impressive on a technological standpoint. Not only do they reproduce games exactly on a 1:1 basis, the NES one supports nearly all of the wildly different NES mappers that even some PC NES emulators still don't do. Meanwhile, they use a simple clean interface and cheap, readily available storage medium in CompactFlash cards, which is much faster than if SD was used.

CF cards are parallel and SD cards are serial. The speed difference really is that much, because of the clear advantages of parallel data throughput vs serial. Not only that, but the electrical specifications of CF cards are very closely related to ATA hard drives, as you may already know it's possible to turn a CF card into a solid state hard drive with a simple pin adapter!

In the domain of professional digital cameras, CF cards are almost exclusively used for picture storage because the camera needs to dump a ton of raw data into permanent memory at high speeds, SD simply doesn't cut it.

Last but not least, for a console gaming related reason for CF over SD, the NES and SNES use parallel ROMs for game storage, using a parallel CF card makes for a simple and straightforward interface. Using a SD card would require complex serial to parallel converting circuitry which would introduce delays and slow everything down even more.

[Ziggy]

There are three main reasons:
1. Demand is relatively low
2. Building any electronics from scratch and producing them is expensive.
3. Doing it well is very difficult.

I wouldn't say the demand is low, not that it's high.

I would like to add to the second point though. I know some one that has looked into getting molds made to make NES cart cases. It was about $1500 just for the molds, plus the price of each run, plus shipping. Not cheap at all.

Then add to this, the cost of the electronics. Take into account that some parts can be bought but the PCB he's designed have to be specially made up. I would love to get into stuff like this myself, but the start up cost is very expensive.

Let's also take into account the time spent designing and building these carts. Who known how many hours were spent designing, how many hours in testing, and how much money was spent building prototypes for testing. Not to mention, he is constantly improving the software and adding updates for the carts.

That being said, I wish they were just a little bit cheaper. But then again, the price has been were it is now for a while, so I guess he's doing well on it.