Market research involving a Megadrive Flashcart

I would like to ask anybody interested in Megadrive homebrew and/or hacking some questions relating to a possible product / line of products. As this is serious, please answer honestly.

The product(s) in question is a Megadrive flashcart, with features such as:

* full and only USB support (uploading and downloading the contents of the flashcart using a USB cable, the cart will appear as a mass storage device to most PCs with USB support)

* from 128 Megabytes to 1 Gigabyte of Flash memory (I haven't decided on that yet, I need to do heavy research on the costs involved, I might release separate products if say, the cost of 1 GB memory is significantly higher than 256 MB and so on)

* SRAM support

* possibly bank switching support?

* the firmware will be upgradable either through me (which is more possible) or by uploading it to the cart (less possible). Note that upgrading the firwmare shouldn't be necessary, it's just a feature that I thought I'd like to implement

Also note that the reason why I'm asking for demand for certain price groups is not to simply sell for the highest price possible, but rather check if there is enough demand to get more cash from it than the costs.


The questions:

Would you:

* buy a 128MB flashcart for $50
* buy a 128MB flashcart for $75
* buy a 128MB flashcart for $100

* buy a 256MB flashcart for $50
* buy a 256MB flashcart for $75
* buy a 256MB flashcart for $100

* buy a 512MB flashcart for $50
* buy a 512MB flashcart for $75
* buy a 512MB flashcart for $100

* buy a 1GB flashcart for $50
* buy a 1GB flashcart for $75
* buy a 1GB flashcart for $100

Any suggestions and/or questions are warmly welcome.

 

It is not possible to manufacture, equip, assemble, package, ship a board in such small quantities (it's a small market, I don't expect the demand to be higher than 50 in 5 years =P) for $10, even if you theoritically buy those nands in such small quantities too.

 

I don't want to reveal anything before I actually make a working prototype. I should have some free time in summer, at least enough to pull this out. I have the general concept in my mind, and I'm tweaking various aspects of it as I find new options and ICs (there's so many to choose from, it's bizarre!).

What I have in mind is this - a flash memory chip controlled by a microcontroller that would act as a mass storage device to the PC when the device is connected to a USB host, and would emulate a cartridge when connected to the Megadrive. I won't bore you with details, as they are going to change probably anyway.

 

I'm grateful for the suggestion, actually.

As for Neoflash - I have mixed feelings about them. From what I've heard, they make crappy NDS flashcarts. Not that I base my opinion on somebody's else, but I'm waiting for almost a year for my MD flashcart to arrive :P

As for teaming up - as much as it would be nice to use somebody's else experience and help, I more want to do this as a personal project, as I think this is a really nice challenge, especially to someone who never did anything like this before. I already learned a ton of stuff just by scheming the thing up, who knows what else awaits

The USB thing shouldn't be a problem - USB supplies +5V voltage, the same as Megadrive does. The main problem would be to write the USB driver, but I already have some pseudocode ready for that (that USB specification doc is a huge brick, hundreds of pages...).

As for competitions and stuff like that - if this thing actually works and I end up manufacturing some units, I'm gonna either make a hacking/homebrew competition or sponsor one. Or something like that. But yea, I was planning to do something like that, it's just a bit awkward to say all those things now, because if I don't end up finishing this, people will be disappointed =P

 

You do realize that CF is Compact Flash? =P

Anyway, I don't see the problem with 'having problems'. I'll test all the units before sending them, and the user will have a warranty for some time, if the cart becomes faulty for some reason.

Anyway, 1GB is enough to hold 256 4MB ROMs. And not every ROM is 4MB anyway.

In my opinion, external memory is more hassle than it's worth really, you're never gonna need more than 1-2 GB anyway with Megadrive, and you need to have a card reader, etc etc. Internal memory is so much easier than that.

Hmm, I've never thought about that. I don't even know how this works, I'd have to look it up. And about CDX - you mean CDX RAM?

 

Oh, no, I meant 1 GB as in 1 Gigabyte, so 1024 Megabytes.

Shouldn't be hard to implement, assuming the design is not terribly different from a standard MD cart. I'll look into it.

Thanks.