vitorvilela

Hype: the Super FX development cartridge package is on the way

Added 2021-04-27 20:02:32 +0000 UTC

Good news! After around 25 days without updates, I just receive a message from Correios (the brazilian USPS equivalent delivery service) that my package just arrived my country and I won't have to pay any import taxes, only the mandatory international shipping fee which is R$ 15 (about US$ 3).

The Super FX development cartridge is a modified Winter Gold (SNES) cartridge with a custom ROM socket that lets me swap the 16 Mbit ROM chip without re-soldering the PCB. That will let me test many games and experiments by just swapping and reprogramming the EPROM chips.

The original Winter Gold cartridge looks like this (source: SNES Central)

Winter Gold is a great donor cart for developing Super FX games and ROM hacks. It comes with the Super FX GSU-2 chip and 512 Kbit RAM (64 KB; the maximum amount of RAM known).

The complete work was made by qwertymodo, a known SNES modder on the community. The Real Phoenix is also working on another Super FX development cartridge for me with overclocking features but there's no estimate yet on when the work will be done, since they recently received the donor cart.

Here you can see the modified cart with a custom socket for swapping ROM chips.

The package also comes with six compatible ROM chips and a TL866-adapter, since the adapter I currently have only works with the 27C322 used on my SA-1 development cartridge.

Everything is expected to arrive my home in about 7-15 days. Once arriving, I will be able to develop and test Super FX games and ROM hacks directly on the hardware.

All costs were covered by the Patreon income from this page, so thank you all once again for the support and for making this possible!