[sdl]

Hello All,

Thank you Admins for my membership approval.
I am new here and I would like to be pointed to the right direction on creating my own multi games (200-in-1) Mega Drive cartridge.
I have seen a FlashKit programmer on sale online and I guess all I need after that is PCB, cartridge shell and creating the ROM with multiple games.(?)
If anyone can give me some info on how to get started on that Id very much appreciate.
Thank you.

[FAST6191]

Doing such things in software is a nightmare -- changing locations in memory means everything that references what it thought was a known location now needs a change. Slim exception for 3 in 1 type games where you might be able to take game housed later in a memory area and put it ahead of a more conventional smaller game.
Any kind of multi ROM is usually reserved for emulators and flash carts that know what to do, or far newer systems that can work with virtual file systems (the original xbox being a food example here).


Any would be flash cart maker will go other approaches, that being you redirect the flash cart to a given spot (classically this would be a page in some kind of NOR memory but today you can probably do NAND or have it copied into RAM on a flash cart). The genesis/megadrive is fairly easy for most things here; you are generally spared the SNES special chips, NES mappers, GB/GBC MBCs and things like that that make memory a tricky concept for those consoles.

If you just want to have a lot of games to play it is a better option to get a game focused flash cart (there are some nice ones out there) rather than a single purpose thing.

[FlashPV]

Just buy an Everdrive.
Nuff said.

[sdl]

Doing such things in software is a nightmare -- changing locations in memory means everything that references what it thought was a known location now needs a change. Slim exception for 3 in 1 type games where you might be able to take game housed later in a memory area and put it ahead of a more conventional smaller game.
Any kind of multi ROM is usually reserved for emulators and flash carts that know what to do, or far newer systems that can work with virtual file systems (the original xbox being a food example here).


Any would be flash cart maker will go other approaches, that being you redirect the flash cart to a given spot (classically this would be a page in some kind of NOR memory but today you can probably do NAND or have it copied into RAM on a flash cart). The genesis/megadrive is fairly easy for most things here; you are generally spared the SNES special chips, NES mappers, GB/GBC MBCs and things like that that make memory a tricky concept for those consoles.

If you just want to have a lot of games to play it is a better option to get a game focused flash cart (there are some nice ones out there) rather than a single purpose thing.

Thanks for your reply. So you reckon those Chinese 100-1+ carts we get since the 90's go through a difficult making process? I mean the Chinese are all about quick-and-dispatch. The impression I get is that all ROMs are made into 1 ROM and then they are copied into a cheap PCB chip. I think that because I have seen those cartridges extracted in a single ROM (of many games).

[KingMike]

If you mean like those 1 billion in 1 Famicom multicarts,
those are made cheaply by taking some or all of the first-gen Famicom games (which had no mapper) and simply adding a mapper, which let them add as many games as the mapper (or their budget for ROM chips) could support, since the original games would have no idea.
(as well as cheap ROM hacks to each game to inflate the game count)

But perhaps that is a special case.
Maybe some addressing logic could be applied to create a similar effect for MD.

Still, as others have said, buying a flashcart which already accomplishes the needed task is a far simpler solution.

But, technically the topic of creating physical hardware is considered off-topic for this site so I should lock the topic.