I've been referring to this cartridge at some points in the past now. It contained about 80 games in several different languages (so the catridge contained about 350 games in total, maybe only 280... I'm really not sure). It even had a cover on it with some of the protagonists of the various games so it may have been sold by Nintendo as a rare collection cart at some point. I tried to search for this game on the internet but I couldn't find any trace of it, be it on ROM sites or google (however, there seem to be similar game collection ROMs out there...). I'm not sure about the name but I think it was in German language, something along the lines of "Spiele Hits 350 in 1".
This catridge is the reason why I know many gameboy games and I've been TASing a lot of the games I knew from the cartridge.
Here are the games I remember that were on the cart:
Pinocchio
Toy Story
Alleyway
Klax
Dr. Mario
Super Mario Land
World bowling
Master Karateka
Kung-Fu Master (Spartan X)
Revenge of the Gator
Kid Niki
Felix The Cat
Daffy Duck - The Marvin Missions
Bubble Ghost
The Smurfs
Hyper Loderunner
Boxxle 2 (Soukoban 2)
Volley Fire
Battle City
Tetris
Motocross Maniacs
Pipe Dream
Flipull
Tennis
Mogura de pon
Maybe someone knows better about these collection cartridges or can redirect me to a site that documents these? (But I don't want people to link me to ROMs... that's not allowed after all)
Maybe some people owned similar collection carts, even for different consoles?
(so the catridge contained about 350 games in total, maybe only 280... I'm really not sure)
I wonder how that is possible. According to Wikipedia the largest Gameboy cartridge has a capacity of 1 MB. For 350 games that would leave slightly less than 3 kilobytes per game.
Well, I suppose many games of the time did not take a lot of space, but even then 3 kilobytes still sounds a bit too little (although my personal experience of that time is mainly from the ZX Spectrum, where games would typically take at least 40 kilobytes, some would take as much as 120 kilobytes, and this is just for games which loaded to RAM entirely in one go, rather than being multi-part games).
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Warp wrote:
MUGG wrote:
(so the catridge contained about 350 games in total, maybe only 280... I'm really not sure)
I wonder how that is possible. According to Wikipedia the largest Gameboy cartridge has a capacity of 1 MB. For 350 games that would leave slightly less than 3 kilobytes per game.
Wikipedia is incorrect.
The Game Boy uses the exact same cartridge media as the Game Boy Color, and multiple Game Boy Color games used absurdly high amounts of space (The first striking examples that come to mind are Cannon Fodder (Due to having full blown FMV sequences and 4-5 minutes worth of PCM audio), and the Harry Potter games), the largest coming to mind is a Japan only game whoms name escapes my mind, the amount of space being taken being 8 megabytes. I would not be surprised if the capacity of cartridges could have reached up to 32 megabytes without issue, if Nintendo held onto the platform long enough.
The Game Boy uses the exact same cartridge media as the Game Boy Color, and multiple Game Boy Color games used absurdly high amounts of space (The first striking examples that come to mind are Cannon Fodder (Due to having full blown FMV sequences and 4-5 minutes worth of PCM audio), and the Harry Potter games), the largest coming to mind is a Japan only game whoms name escapes my mind, the amount of space being taken being 8 megabytes. I would not be surprised if the capacity of cartridges could have reached up to 32 megabytes without issue, if Nintendo held onto the platform long enough.
Ok, that explains it.
OTOH, I really wonder how they could afford that kind of storage capacity. It's not the same technology, of course, but in 1989 (when the Game Boy was released) a 32-megabyte hard drive (which was not at all an atypical hard drive size for PCs in 1989) was relatively expensive. Of course I'm not an expert on this subject, so a cartridge containing read-only data might been significantly cheaper to produce.
Joined: 11/4/2007
Posts: 1772
Location: Australia, Victoria
Warp wrote:
Ok, that explains it.
OTOH, I really wonder how they could afford that kind of storage capacity. It's not the same technology, of course, but in 1989 (when the Game Boy was released) a 32-megabyte hard drive (which was not at all an atypical hard drive size for PCs in 1989) was relatively expensive. Of course I'm not an expert on this subject, so a cartridge containing read-only data might been significantly cheaper to produce.
ROM prices have, in relative terms, crashed. It's far cheaper to get 4 megabytes of ROM nowadays compared to 1989, or even 2002-2003 (When Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was published), it's probably the reason Game Boy Advance games were able to have such high capacities (For comparison, the Advance version of Chamber of Secrets had twice the capacity, and was released at the same time).
Personally, I'd have loved to see what developers could have done with a 32 megabyte Game Boy Color game, there's a lot you can do with 32 megabytes... shame the PCM playback support is so limited on the Color, PCM background music would have been awesome.
There can be chips on the cartridge that intercept read/write requests (much like the Game Genie); they can be programmed to map a section of the entire ROM data into an "adress window" that is then directly accessible by the base system.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_switching#Video_game_consoles
Necroing this thread to link this. What I was always curious about is that the pirates made custom cover arts. That's why, as a kid, I assumed it was an official cart I owned.
Necroing this thread to link this. What I was always curious about is that the pirates made custom cover arts. That's why, as a kid, I assumed it was an official cart I owned.
I guess Pokemon Chaos Black totally looks like an official game.
I guess Pokemon Chaos Black totally looks like an official game.
