Development Cartridges! The most vital piece of hardware required in running code and games you write on the real console. If you're not lucky enough to find official development hardware, devcarts can be either made from complete scratch or by modifying existing carts. Most of the time it is much easier to just modify existing cartridges, especially since many cartridges, such as Nintendo's use custom chips, including the MMC1-MMC5, Konami's VRCs, and so on. These chips can only be obtained from existing cartridges. One could reimplement them in an FPGA or such, but then, that would be partially emulating the games, and we want to run them entirely on real hardware!
On this site, you will find information on official development cartridges, as well as my own custom built ones. As great as the official development hardware is, some times, homebuilt equivilants can be as good, or even better. For example, in the case of NES development, the technology we have today allows us to develop games much easier than was possible in the 1980s. We can write hardware and development IDEs under modern operating systems, rather than developing NES games using DOS or C64s as some did.
Simple devcarts can usually be made by just removing the existing ROMs and rewiring the board to use EPROMs. In some cases though, it gets more complicated, as some carts have logic/mapper circuitry built into the same IC as the ROM (common in Game Gear, Master System, Game Boy Advance, etc.). Generally there are ways around these issues though, so they aren't too big a deal. In the case of the GG/SMS, one just needs to find a cartridge to hack up that doesn't contain the all-in-one chip. There are a number of different cartridges with this configuration if you know what to look for. In the case of the GBA, you can of course, just purchase flash carts, but if you want to build your own, especially a nice RAM development system, the extra circuitry is simple multiplexing logic, which is not hard to implement.
EPROMs are fine for running your game on hardware every so often, but if you want to do full development on hardware and toss the emulators all together, you need at minimum, flash/EEPROMs, preferably RAMs. EPROMs must be specially programmed with 12-25V, and erased with hazardous UV. Flash ROMs are much better, as can be programmed in system. I no longer use EPROM devcarts for development, only Flash/RAM carts.
All of my NES hardware development is done using my Devtendo NES Development unit. The cartridges I show on here can be programmed without being removed from the NES! They can be put in the NES, it can be powered on, and they can be erased/programmed/debugged as many times as needed without even touching the hardware! Even without a Devtendo unit though, you can still use the information to build your own devcarts.
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News
[2004-08-29 17:41] NES-TKROM RAM Cartridge
I've posted a bunch of info on my TK-ROM RAM development cartridge. Check it out!
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