News: NES flash cart - Powerpak

June 14, 2007, 12:19 AM

by brandon, via RetroZone -
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Oddly enough someone has only just now gotten around to releasing an NES flash cart. They're pretty expensive, but pretty neat to look at. And apparently they're sold out for now, but are getting more in stock... they appear to be updatable and somewhat versatile. I like the label and cart! It seems to use super oldschool Compact Flash, so if you kept the memory from your 5 year old camera, it wasn't all for naught. Thanks to Sweater Fish for finding this. Here are some words about it that may mean something to somebody:

When you start your NES you get a file browser to choose your game. Then you can save and load battery ram so all your saved games stay saved. Save files can also be transferred to and from your computer for use on emulators. Built in Game Genie code support lets you use cheat codes. Even better than the original Game Genie, the PowerPak has support for 5 codes at once.

Games load very fast, average around 7 seconds. This means a quick cycle for homebrew development on any mapper. Now you can see your game on real hardware instead of relying on emulators. FAT16 or FAT32 format is used so there is no special software to load games onto the card. Organize your games in folders any way you want for faster browsing. Compact Flash is used instead of something else like SD for maximum speed. The NES processor is the bottleneck so the parallel CF card is more than 10 times faster than the serial SD card.

The entire PowerPak system is updateable for future additions and bug fixes. All mapper files are stored on the CF card for easy upgrading. Just download the most recent Mappers file below, unzip, then copy the folder to the root of your CF card. Using CopyNES the boot rom can be reflashed but this will hopefully never be needed.