xxx-in-1 ROM question

Does anyone know how they get all the roms onto one cart? Like, do they all just fit on a flash chip, or is there some sort of compression method used? I'm real curious about the ins and outs of this device. Thanks!

Games are 'small'. Flash is cheap. Get someone to program a menu. Mass produce it. Done.

First, thanks for the honest answer. So why all this crosstalk about whether or not you can change the games on the chip? I was looking into the 138 - in - 1 and it actually loads the ROM into RAM data before restarting the NG. With so many duplicate and cloned games on the menu, You'd think someone would be able to reprogram at least one of these carts (pardon my ignorance).

Yep. ram/rom(flash) is probably how i would do it.

The ram emulates a cartridge as it's fast enough to read from to appear as 'rom' to the neogeo.

I'm not sure you could rewrite the flash inside the multicarts, maybe it's one-time programmable, this is cheaper to manufacture & maximize profit..

You would have to open one up, dump the contents and check the parts. I'm sure there are people skilled enough to make a 'proper' everything-in-one multicart. Perhaps it's not been done because of cost-related reasons.

Possibly the flash content is encrypted in some way to protect the pirates' effort in the menu and such.

I don´t know exactly why but apparently it at least isn´t simple to rewrite the flash.
I had a helpful person help me with some snes stuff and he also knows a bit about neo geo.
Basically, he was able to make a Starfox 2 snes cart for me from a stunt race fx cart, he reprogrammed the eeprom or something. I asked him if he can also customize a 161-in-1 for me but he said it can´t be done. So I trust him

Someone out there must be able to do this or else we wouldn't have these multicarts available to us in the first place.

Mendel said:

I don´t know exactly why but apparently it at least isn´t simple to rewrite the flash.
I had a helpful person help me with some snes stuff and he also knows a bit about neo geo.
Basically, he was able to make a Starfox 2 snes cart for me from a stunt race fx cart, he reprogrammed the eeprom or something. I asked him if he can also customize a 161-in-1 for me but he said it can´t be done. So I trust him

Click to expand...

Just get someone else with a serious programmer (starting at 400 euros) and he'll be able to read the contents. Now comes the hard part, to understand how the pirate's menu pages the ram (or "load" a specific part of the whole data), where in the whole flash every game start (address) and swap duplicated games with another one, readdressing whatever comes after that game. That should be the theory.