Retrozone's PowerPak

[nintendodork]

I think CF cards are fine, since he provides the option for you to include one with your order (at a very nice price!).  He also gave a good reason as to why he doesn't use SD cards.  He says the CF cards make it possible to browse directories and load games faster.

[cubelmariomadness]

If it was sd, it'd take forever to load.

[manuel]

Is speed really that important?
Loading a game of 4 or 8 megabytes shouldn't take so long.
Only browsing might be marginally slower I assume.

In the end I wouldn't worry too much, either way. I have some unused SD cards, so I always choose devices with SD card slots naturally. (Plus, my PC has an SD card slot. For CF cards i'd have to pull out my old cardreader)
But if I bought this it wouldn't kill me to buy a CF card in addition.

[cubelmariomadness]

I think he said that it would be like...as long as 1:10 seconds to load.

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.

[manuel]

Wow, I wouldn't have expected such a big difference in speed.

[133MHz]

CF cards are parallel and SD cards are serial. The speed difference really is that much, because of the clear advantages of parallel data throughput vs serial. Not only that, but the electrical specifications of CF cards are very closely related to ATA hard drives, as you may already know it's possible to turn a CF card into a solid state hard drive with a simple pin adapter!

In the domain of professional digital cameras, CF cards are almost exclusively used for picture storage because the camera needs to dump a ton of raw data into permanent memory at high speeds, SD simply doesn't cut it.

Last but not least, for a console gaming related reason for CF over SD, the NES and SNES use parallel ROMs for game storage, using a parallel CF card makes for a simple and straightforward interface. Using a SD card would require complex serial to parallel converting circuitry which would introduce delays and slow everything down even more.

[manuel]

I wasn't aware of the parallel vs serial difference when I said the above.
Thanks for the explanation. This way even I get it. 

Now I also understand why all those high-end cameras in photo studios use CF cards.

[UglyJoe]

I thought it was a parallel vs serial thing

OT, but why then is it that SATA is faster than PATA -- and why doesn't SD have the same advantage over CF?

[133MHz]

OT, but why then is it that SATA is faster than PATA

Mostly because of several indirect improvements like a higher clock rate than PATA, the use of efficient data encoding techniques and application specific enhancements. You could theoretically boost PATA in the same way and end up with 8 times the throughput of SATA, but at those high clock rates there would be too much crosstalk and interference between the data lines which would make the data link unusable. SATA can get away with this because (in a rough way) if you've got only one data line you don't have to worry about interference with adjacent data lines because they just don't exist .

and why doesn't SD have the same advantage over CF?

SD was designed to be slow from the ground up. It runs at a slower clock rate and uses a less efficient protocol. CF was designed with speed in mind.

[nintendodork]

Bump because everyone's talking about it.


....


*Cough*

[MS-DOS4]

I dont want to get too off topic here, but I have a PSP that's version 1.50 and runs the old kernel exploits. I assume that PSP emulation capabilities have grown leaps and bounds in the two or so years since I last fiddled with my PSP. Can you point me anywhere where I might be able to learn what I need to do in order to update my PSP to allow for PS1, stable SNES and non blurry NES emulation? It might be better if you just PM me. Thanks.

This is where I went:

http://www.pspiso.com

God dammit, that site destroyed my computer. Curse you javascript advertisements!

[satoshi_matrix]

Hey guys, update time! I installed the new Powerpak firmware 1.32 and now all issues I had getting FDS games to run have vanished. I however have noticed that the FDS distinctive sound isn't present. I've read through this thread about the possibility of adding it back in. 

The Powerpak readme states "To hear expansion audio, put a 47k resistor between pins 3 and 9 of the NES expansion connector."

I'm running the powerpak through a high quality 72-60 pin converter on my Overclocked and Zapper supported AV Famicom. As far as I remember, unlike the NES, the Famicom does have the ability to access external sound, so I'm a little confused as to what's up.

What do I need to do in order to hear the proper FDS audio for my setup? I plan on asking 133Mhz of course, but I thought  I'd post here in case others have the same question and community suggestions.   

[nensondubois]

Your adapted will have to modified with the resistor as well.

wait a minute! did you say "... about the possibility of adding it back in."? You just answered yourself. FDS audio has been removed and it is not stated anywhere on http://www.retrousb.com/product_info.php?cPath=24&products_id=34

You should probably direct your questions to everybody, of course.

[satoshi_matrix]

The 72 to 60 pin adapter needs to be modded huh? Okay. What size resistor will I need?

[ericj]

I would guess that you need a 47k ohm, as you mentioned above.