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looking to get some super monkey ball carts made.. how would I best go about that?

Lemony Vengeance

Lemony Vengeance

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Disclaimer: This request is for me, and my personal use alone. They will not be resold, and the service will not be offered to anyone.

I would rather not get multiple netdimms/dimms/GDROMs for the same game. It seems slightly excessive to netboot 4 copies of the same game when I want to have friends over to jam on SMB.

I know WHO I can talk with to get a cart made, however, I would rather not have them make it due to the notoriety of the dodgy quality of their work. is there someone else out there that also performs this service?

OR

is there a tutorial that I can follow to make my own?

**edit**

here's the thread where it's discussed
https://www.arcade-projects.com/threads/converting-gdrom-naomi-games-to-cart.1691/
and a rundown given by @invzim
https://www.arcade-projects.com/threads/naomi-cart-repair-to-ikaruga.3998/

this sounds like more effort for me to do on its own than it's worth.
 
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There's a HUGE thread on this with all of the info needed, but it would take you a long time to sort through it.
https://www.arcade-projects.com/threads/converting-gdrom-naomi-games-to-cart.1691/

Here are the cliff notes (from memory, so if others see inaccurate info please correct me)

There are several variants of the Cart PCB and it boils down to this:
older Sega cart boards are very straight forward to use but have a limited size so wont fit larger games.
Namco cart boards and some of the Capcom cart boards are too difficult to work with/haven't been fully documented for this use
newer flash boards can store very large games but requires some special setups to program them and it takes a very long time.

First and foremost the image needs to be decrypted then you need to see how the program is arranged and if it will even fit on/work with a cart. CF and Net Boot Images are decrypted but might not be the best for conversion, particularly net-boot images often have modifications to make them work. your best bet is to take an original disc image and decrypt it yourself.

Assuming you're working with an older style Sega board you basically just need to chop up the decrypted game image into 64Mbit chunks for each of the ROMs.
the first chunk is cut in half (2x 32Mbit chunks). the first half is programmed to a 27C322 which goes in the IC22 socket and the second half is thrown away because there is no spot on the cart for it... this is obviously a huge problem for some games because they have data there.
Some games like Street Fighter Zero 3 Upper have no data here, so it just works. Other games like Ikaruga only have test menu code here so it works but you lose the test menu. Any game that has critical data here either needs to be patched to move that data out of this ROM region, or you simply can't use this style cart.

I could be wrong but I THINK the newer style flash carts don't have this issue. but those carts are generally harder to find and quite a bit more expensive as only a few games were released on them and they're desirable games. That's because the Flash carts where the very late releases on the NAOMI AFTER they abandoned GD-ROM and went back to carts.
 
Also, I forgot to mention that those older Sega Cart boards use 5V SOP44 64-Mbit ROMs. since you cant buy those and the closest equivalent is 3.3V you'll need to lift the power pins and run a 3.3V converter to power them. Similar to doing PGM cart conversions on original PCBs. I think the Sega Security chip needs to be removed (or can be removed) as well I know I've seen it gone on conversion carts and on the few rare carts that were decrypted from the factory it's not populated.

the flash carts don't have this issue since you're just re-flashing the existing chips.
 
I simply paid Jorge to make me a dual CvS2/MvC2 cart (uses his own BIOS to select game based on Naomi DIP).
I later sold it, when the Taito JVS IO required the use of a patched BIN file to operate (NetDIMM).
 
The Jorge carts kinda suck IMO. He basically gets around the dead spot in the ROM region by patching the bios to shift the game position past it.... but then it requires the custom bios.

he also horded a f-ton of flash carts so he could do 2-games per cart (which also require his custom bios to use the dip switches to determine which ROM region is being used). Honestly I feel like this is the reason a lot of those flash cart games are now $300 and rare when they used to be $60 and common.
 
twistedsymphony said:
Honestly I feel like this is the reason a lot of those flash cart games are now $300 and rare when they used to be $60 and common.
Click to expand...
That is more like an issue/symptom of the times (retro hype) we live in.

Think of the CPS2 multi for a moment... Initially many people said how this would return boards to the marketplace.
Potentially lowering the price and making the hardware more available/accessible to newcomers.

While that did happen in a way, the prices didn't follow suit...
If anything they are higher than ever, even common/bad games because everyone knows you can just multi it now.
 
jassin000 said:
That is more like an issue/symptom of the times (retro hype) we live in.
Click to expand...
they're both contributing factors. but there were a few years where any low-cost flash-cart game was bought up by Jorge. If you saw them on YAJ or ebay you were guaranteed to be bidding against him. Even trash games that no one wants are in the $300+ range because those cart's just aren't on the market anymore. is like Major Title 2, or Quiz Gakumon pricing being stupid because everyone bought them for conversions, except it's one guy.

Honestly what we really need is a NAOMI Repo/conversion PCB in the same vein as the PGM conversion PCBs. you could probably make a 27c322 variant of it, without the gap for smaller games and then one with built in 3.3V support for running larger 64Mbit SOP44 ROMs without all the hacky wiring.

hey @Fluffy you up for it? :D
 
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twistedsymphony said:
Honestly what we really need is a NAOMI Repo/conversion PCB
Click to expand...
You are preaching to the quire with that one!

I've been begging @Darksoft to make a true Naomi multi for 6 years now.
I blame that lazy NetDIMM hack as to why we still don't have one, coupled with a "good enough" mentality of course.

If more malcontents like me existed, you'd realize NOTHING will ever be good enough! :S:D
 
I'm not talking about a multi-cart. I'm talking about a bare PCB that we can run a single game on without having to deal with stupid wire hacks and voltage conversions.

honestly this is something that could probably be done with not too much effort and a very low price.
 
I've been meaning to look into a Monkey Ball cart conversion too, because I get drive errors all the time with the setup that I have.

The Monkey Ball image isn't very large so should fit on the smaller carts too (I think).
 
The real question is, will it work with the gap.

Also, Virtua NBA is a game that had no security chip from the factory and ran on the older style Sega board. so swapping out your conversion ROMs over that game could be a good way to test in emulator before you commit to hardware.
 
I'm pretty invested in this. I actually bought a huge lot of non-working NAOMI carts a while back with the intent of converting as many GDROM games to cart as I could... never really found the time to dedicate to it though lol.
 
I have it booting in Mame. It fits exactly into the needed rom space.

0000.png
0004.png
0002.png
 
twistedsymphony said:
I have a theory that all of the game with a gap in the code right where the cart needs it, were originally designed for cart use
Click to expand...
I also believe this theory, GDROM was a design afterthought that promised easy/cheap distribution while maintaining high levels of security.
When these early Naomi games were developed GD hardware wasn't in use, thus they must have been targeting a cart release with the code and changed/reworked it later.
 
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