Quote:
Lester Knight wrote:
I am by no means a VB expert. From what I can recall, the version we have now was compiled from source and no actual cart has ever surfaced.
That's right. The ROM we have was built from slightly modified source code. It was a single switch statement that had to be rewritten to work around a bug in the official C compiler (VUCC). VUCC outputs ISX files, which are binaries with added debug headers for use with the VUE-Debugger. Two separate ISX converters had been written by LameBoy and RunnerPack for this cause. I think we used RP's to convert the final ROM that was released.
Earlier attempts to build using gccVB and VUCC produced two buggy ROMs which ran well on emulators but crapped out on hardware. I didn't release these publically until it came to my attention that someone from the "inner circle" that were given the ROM did some shady business selling the ROM and fake prototype cartridges to people.
All in all, it took almost 7 years from obtaining the source code to finally being able to build a good ROM from it.
Quote:
Lester Knight wrote:
The reason I am interested in the history is that this cart looks production ready yet it has a battery. Bound High! uses a password system. So it has me wondering, what is this cart exactly? Was it a late prototype where they were toying with battery saves? Did someone from Nintendo add to another PCB to build this proto?
The SRAM is present simply because it's a generic development flash cart that was meant to be used for any kind of game, with or without save support. I don't think a dev cart without SRAM even exists.
Fun fact: these carts even come with 64 KByte of SRAM (Sharp LH5264TH-L). That's 8 times the size of retail carts' SRAM, which had only 8 KByte.
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