Okay, if I’m reading this correctly this “power pak” is a NES cart with compact flash that I can download NES roms into and play on my Nintendo. It seems very similar to the Hong Kong Gameboy & DS rom carts and usually my first reaction is to point screaming “STOP ILLEGAL HAX†but the chance to play any NES game on the original system that the roms were originally meant for is quite tempting. Man that’s an opportunity I’m having a hard time passing up. Too bad the outlandish sticker price of $155.oo for the cartridge, 256 mb compact flash and CF usb cable is way too rich for my blood. I’ll just stick with my modded Xbox or iMac w/ roms. Â
Ala: Insert Credit:
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.
–Jangofatt ($155 richer or until his defenses are weakened by temptation)
NES flash cart – Powerpak [Insertcredit]
