Making SEGA Genesis cartridges

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pbj:
More chips, more pcbs, more sports games shells….

Lots of home brew and rom patches in this pile.

SF2 using the Z80 for audio. Arkagis Revolution doing sprite rotation. No idea how they pulled that off.

I also made myself a Rambo 3. Used to actually own this. A very odd, very early Genesis game. I remember screenshots in the print ads not matching up to the actual game. The enemy sprites don’t do that flicker thing so when you get a bunch of enemies on screen it slows to a crawl. I counted ten enemies at one point.

Very unfortunate ending in hindsight.

bobbyb13:
It was an astute person who penned the "Graveyard of Empires" moniker.

Crazy how many of those games I have never heard of.

But those Blockbuster labels bring back some memories!

pbj:
What a difference two months makes…

So, every morning I wake up and slam three heaping tablespoons of this now. I like to use a brewery glass because it helps me pretend I’m fun.

The good news is I’m not dying of colon cancer. Frankly that’s surprising news as the symptoms and family history weren’t great. Those of you unfortunate enough to receive texts from me have heard all about this already but 2022 was a damned spooky year.

Also, do not eat jerky labelled INFERNO from a man with a tattoo on his ass of the grim reaper eating a Carolina reaper pepper. I thought I was going to end up in the ER. My specialist got a good laugh out of that anecdote.

But all that aside, I’ve truly felt the best lately that I have in months. So that’s great.

Other big change was I couldn’t take the old gig anymore, tossed my resume out there, and was scooped quickly. It’s fully remote, which is very weird, and I’ve lost access to that sweet, sweet color laser printer I pulled out of a junk pile at the last job.

Okay, here we go. I got some HP inkjet with “unlimited automatic ink refills” for 15 months for $75 all in. The ink smudges if it gets damp, as can be seen on my text on this label where I licked my thumb and rubbed my sizing notes to simulate spilling beer on a game at 2am. So I broke out some duck tape and water based acrylic clearcoat. I haven’t yet resigned myself to sanding mailing labels, so I got a leathery texture. I gave them four coats.

This forum chews posts so I’ll respond to myself to continue…

pbj:
So, I sorted my rather large box of old pcbs into SEGA and everything else. I’m actually very low on non-saving Genesis games, but I do have a few of these cartridges that split roms in half onto smaller chips to save money manufacturing.

That one on the right was formerly Joe Montana Sports Talk Football, a 1MB game split onto two 512kB chips,

I thought I would get away with just removing the bottom chip and putting Last Battle (512kB chip) on there.

Thus far I cannot get it to boot.

I subsequently pried off the mapper chip and the top rom. They came off completely clean and left clear holes. I’m starting to wonder about all that time I spent hunched over smoldering hog lard.

Anyway, no change. I suspect one of the ROM lines is routed weird… like chip enable or something. Two hours (and counting!) spent on this in order to save $2 on a repro board. No regrets. I’ll chunk it in my “remove this eprom some day” pile.

But I did get Mystic Defender and Twinkle Tale going. The price of a legit Twinkle Tale will curl your toes ($400ish). I actually owned Mystic Defender back in the day. The only person that did. Level 4 is ---fracking--- impossible. It’s so hard the attract mode is literally showing you how to beat it. Still impossible. I cannot crack this game even with Game Genie codes as they don’t work on the lava in level 4. I spent a long time in code generator generator mode in the Fusion emulator and couldn’t come up with anything that worked. Fun graphics glitches, tho!

Anyway, more to come….

:cheers:

bobbyb13:
Great posts these last few.
Sounds like excellent news actually- and that is a great pint glass.
Good on you flushing the system.

The Mystic Defender blurb made me chuckle out loud, which I needed, so thank you!
:cheers:

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