#29311 - blinky465 - Wed Nov 17, 2004 3:42 pm
I'm just doing a quick straw poll here but here goes:
I'm looking at investing some of my hard earned (about 2 grand) into 500 ROM cartridges and a ROM burner. The prices I've been quoted would mean that each cart would cost around ?5.
I'm hoping that my latest wheeze will be a blinding success but if not, I may end up with a load of carts (non-Flash) to dispose of.
Then I thought, would anyone be interested in having their game burned onto a ROM cart at a reasonable price (for example, to give games away with CV/resume, as presents etc.)? So instead of forking out ?70+ for a Flash cart (only to give it away) or relying on giving your game to only the people you know with Flash carts already, you could give/sell your game for about a fiver a piece.
Would anyone be interested in this service?
I would like to guage the level of interest in this before sinking my cash into a huge box of carts.
ps. the carts, I'm told, are 64Mbit.
#29317 - Abscissa - Wed Nov 17, 2004 7:44 pm
I would have two main concerns:
1. How "the big N" would react.
2. Whether I would have to buy in some sort of bulk. ie, what the minimum order quantity would be.
If I knew for certain that neither of those would be an issue, then I would probably be rather interested (for the approx 1-10 quantity). Without any certainty about one of both of those, I'd probably sort of shy away from it. And I don't see how there could be any certainty either way about #1.
#29318 - keldon - Wed Nov 17, 2004 7:50 pm
Well you could do the following:
1. set up a paypal account
2. set up a mailing list specifically for people who will purchase
3. when you have a viable number of requests set a day by which they must send the money to your paypal account
4. order the stock
If it turns out that half of the people did not come up with the goods then you can return their money. People should be quite happy to buy a few cartridges so that they could give the game to many people or try out multiplayer.
---
You could even double up and attempt to cut a deal with Martin Korth and have nocash selling in bulk to a larger amount of people for a small discount, considering you will have a large enough money to benefit him.
#29322 - blinky465 - Wed Nov 17, 2004 9:47 pm
1. Tricky this one.... Nintendo would be pretty miffed I guess, given that they want a slice of everything, if this forum is anything to go by!
Although, under UK law, I don't know of any legal objections they could raise (I don't want to go over the whole copyright/patent thing here, it's been done to death) or any legal impediment to stop you selling your game in volume if you like. The tools used to write the software are all open source and not subject to Nintendo's licencing, and by being a one-time write only medium, the cartridges could only hold your game and would not be useable for pirate games.
Also, since production runs are low volume, low key (even if someone wants a couple of hundred at a time) I wouldn't expect much interest from Nintendo, unless someone was lucky enough to hit upon the next big thing!
The way I see it working would be: developers send (mail or upload to a site) their ROM, quantity required, and make payment (PayPal or cheque, to cover costs only). Once funds are cleared, I would burn x carts using the one-time ROM writer, containing the ROM and post the whole lot back to the developer, via recorded delivery.
Minimum order *for me* is 500 carts, so once I had committed to this crazy idea, I would have the carts 'in stock' and so would not need to wait around to hit minimum order values before placing an order with the wholesaler. Turnaround for the developer would be a few days at most.
2. I would expect minimum orders to be pretty low - say a production run of 4 or 5 carts.
I just thought that if someone were to offer this kind of service, I would love to have a low volume run of between 5-10 carts so I could give my game away to friends/family for Xmas. And at ?5/cart, a max of ?50 for 10 Xmas presents, home publishing would finally be a possibility.
But at present, no-one is offering this service, so I thought either:
a) all us homebrew developers could club together and buy a boxful of carts, but then we'd all have just a few carts, and we'd each need to buy the ROM burner and learn how it worked etc. And there's an awful lot of trust and organisation required to pull this off, or
b) I could put a bit of commitment into my game project, put my money where my mouth is, break the bank and just go for it. I appreciate that many homebrew developers are working on a shoestring budget, so thought that if I could get the cash together to make a bulk purchase, I could offer a low-volume service to other developers, to try to recoup a little bit of my outlay!
#29328 - expos1994 - Wed Nov 17, 2004 11:35 pm
Sounds like a good idea. I'd certainly buy some of them.
So you actually will be purchasing a machine that burns the ROMS. How much does something like that run?
#29331 - ScottLininger - Thu Nov 18, 2004 12:36 am
I'd be very interested as well.
Would you be doing this on a "for profit" basis, or would people just pay you cost+shipping?
If you decide to go through with this, I'd be happy to help you build a website to handle the orders, uploading of ROMs, etc. Let me know.
-Scott
#29334 - blinky465 - Thu Nov 18, 2004 12:58 am
I'm hoping that my own game idea will take off and will quickly pay for the outlay in getting hold of the equipment, and turn into a profit.
In the meantime, I thought I could start to recoup some of the outlay by offering this service.
So no, this idea is not for profit - you would pay just the cost of the carts and postage.
Thanks for the offer of help Scott; I will email/pm to discuss.
#29337 - tepples - Thu Nov 18, 2004 4:48 am
Will the OTP carts be programmable in a GBA with any of the popular flash linkers or through an MBV2 or XBOO cable? Or do they require special hardware or voltages that the popular flash linkers can't provide?
The other problem here is the shitty exchange rate that makes Americans feel like Canadians.
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#29339 - Abscissa - Thu Nov 18, 2004 4:58 am
| tepples wrote: |
| Will the OTP carts be programmable in a GBA with any of the popular flash linkers or through an MBV2 or XBOO cable? Or do they require special hardware or voltages that the popular flash linkers can't provide? |
If they're ROM carts like blinky465 said, than the only "programmability" would involve a soldering iron, desoldering tools, and a new chip ;)
Unless I misunderstand what you mean by "OTP cart".
#29344 - blinky465 - Thu Nov 18, 2004 11:28 am
[quote="Abscissa"] | tepples wrote: |
| If they're ROM carts like blinky465 said, than the only "programmability" would involve a soldering iron, desoldering tools, and a new chip ;) |
Exactly - the reason these carts are so 'cheap' (comparitively anyway) is that they are *not* Flash carts. You need special hardware to program them and once written, there's no changing them.
#29347 - sgeos - Thu Nov 18, 2004 4:52 pm
I'm assuming these particular carts have no capability to save.
-Brendan
#29349 - tepples - Thu Nov 18, 2004 5:04 pm
| blinky465 wrote: |
| the reason these carts are so 'cheap' (comparitively anyway) is that they are *not* Flash carts. You need special hardware to program them and once written, there's no changing them. |
"There's no changing them" is what I meant by OTP, or one time programmable. I was conjecturing that the OTP cards could be programmed one time inside a GBA, inside a Visoly FA linker, or inside an EZ-FLASH linker.
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#29389 - blinky465 - Fri Nov 19, 2004 1:49 pm
| tepples wrote: |
| I was conjecturing that the OTP cards could be programmed one time inside a GBA, inside a Visoly FA linker, or inside an EZ-FLASH linker. |
I'm afraid I don't know much about the hardware involved- it was described thus: a PCB into which you insert a Flash cart and a blank OTP cartridge. After a minute or so, the image from the Flash cart is transferred to the OTP cart.
It's basically hardware for one-at-a-time cart duplication
(a bit like the old tape-to-tape and vcr copying machines back in the 80s!)
I have a Flash cart which I use for testing my own games on the GBA hardware which I program by connecting a usb cable from the PC to the cart directly. Is this what is known as a Flash linker? (sorry for showing my ignorance!)
I don't know if you can program the carts yourself without this hardware.
#29394 - tepples - Fri Nov 19, 2004 4:18 pm
| blinky465 wrote: |
| it was described thus: a PCB into which you insert a Flash cart and a blank OTP cartridge. After a minute or so, the image from the Flash cart is transferred to the OTP cart. |
Almost. The Visoly Flash Advance linker and the EZ-FLASH linkers connected to a PC through a USB port (or in the case of old Visoly linkers, the parallel port) and received a ROM image over that connection.
I don't have anything substantial yet to have written to the carts at your fab, but I might show up for the second round.
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#29455 - Voltaic - Sat Nov 20, 2004 11:58 am
Assuming this is about what I think it is (E.g. a One-Time burn, ROM cart is created), I'd be for it.
What I assume you're presenting is a way for people to not have to spend the money on an expensive flash cart that can be re-written, but instead on a "Production" cart so to speak.. Something you can hand to someone, and they can't erase it, but you determine what is on the cart.
Sounds like a great idea. When I'm finished with the program I'm working on, I've already got a few people that are wanting to get their hands on a copy of it, and they were quite apalled at a $60-100 price tag. Of course, if I can get it for closer to $5-10, I'd imagine things would be looking better. :)
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#29457 - Lord Graga - Sat Nov 20, 2004 1:02 pm
| tepples wrote: |
| The other problem here is the shitty exchange rate that makes Americans feel like Canadians. |
Which is good for the rest of the world because buying things on the internet just suddenly became a lot cheaper ;)
#29497 - blinky465 - Sun Nov 21, 2004 2:48 am
| Voltaic wrote: |
| I assume you're presenting a way for people to not have to spend the money on an expensive flash cart that can be re-written, but instead on a "Production" cart so to speak.. Something you can hand to someone, and they can't erase it, but you determine what is on the cart. |
Exactly. Then I suppose you could always use local printers/suppliers to have your booklets/labels printed.
| Voltaic wrote: |
| a few people...were quite apalled at a $60-100 price tag. Of course, if I can get it for closer to $5-10, I'd imagine things would be looking better. :) |
I too was stunned at the idea of having to ask people to fork out ?80 a time just to cover the cost of the flash cart. It'll be end of Jan/Feb before I can get the ?2k needed to set up, but once I have the hardware and carts it would cost around ?4-?5 ($7-$8) to produce a cart.
#30890 - paradime - Sun Dec 05, 2004 9:17 pm
Interesting topic...what kind of equipment is needed to make production ROMs for a GBA? What are the various sources for this type of equipment?
#31207 - bobrocks - Wed Dec 08, 2004 9:52 pm
I would most definately be interested, in fact I just made a topic looking for the availability of something like this!
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#31292 - josath - Thu Dec 09, 2004 6:20 pm
I too just want to voice my support, this is awesome, and if you pull this off, you would be providing a very usefull service. I have a couple games I have written, which I could easily fit into 64Mbit, and have a nice game I could give away to friends/younger brothers to play.
Keep us all posted on any developments!
#31294 - Lupin - Thu Dec 09, 2004 6:41 pm
how is this writer working? Because if you'd need to write 1 cart at once and need to wait for the writing to finish it would take quite long to burn 500 carts...
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#31300 - josath - Thu Dec 09, 2004 7:23 pm
| Quote: |
| how is this writer working? Because if you'd need to write 1 cart at once and need to wait for the writing to finish it would take quite long to burn 500 carts... |
Well, I'm assuming he's not going to write all 500 at once.... people would order maybe 5 or 10 and he would just do those.
#31307 - blinky465 - Thu Dec 09, 2004 10:07 pm
| Lupin wrote: |
| if you'd need to write 1 cart at once and need to wait for the writing to finish it would take quite long to burn 500 carts... |
I'm only going off what I've been told, but the general principle is that I need to copy the gba ROM file onto a FLash cart, then put this cart, and a blank OTP ROM into the dedicated cart duplication hardware, and set it "copying".
It takes a minute or two to create a cart in this way.
To burn off 500 carts would take a long time, but I would expect homebrew developers to be creating low volumes for posterity.
If anyone wanted to do a "production run" of hundreds (maybe to sell in the shops) it would indeed take a few hours.
#31411 - bobrocks - Fri Dec 10, 2004 9:16 pm
not to be a pain, but have you decided if you are going to go through with this or not? If you don't think so, could you give me the contact info you have to get the carts/burner?
thanks!
-Bob
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#31487 - qwertycho - Sat Dec 11, 2004 7:20 am
| bobrocks wrote: |
not to be a pain, but have you decided if you are going to go through with this or not? If you don't think so, could you give me the contact info you have to get the carts/burner?
thanks!
-Bob |
I'm kind of in the same situation, I imagine your getting these carts from some hong kong pirater. How do you have these connections to get blank flash carts, I'm sure nintendo is not willing to sell them to the public.
#31496 - blinky465 - Sat Dec 11, 2004 12:05 pm
| qwertycho wrote: |
| I imagine your (sic) getting these carts from some hong kong pirater. How do you have these connections to get blank flash carts, I'm sure nintendo is not willing to sell them to the public. |
Well, I approached SimonB on this forum, who is running the GBA2004 competition - he is able to get hold of OTP carts in batches of 500 and they work out around ?4-?5 per cart for the first batch.
I've also been quoted ?8/cart supposedly direct from a supplier but I suspect that the company I contacted were acting as middle-man agents and adding their slice on top.
The carts are NOT Nintendo endorsed, and I did think about posting a request to see if a number of people wanted to club together to buy a box of carts and split the cost- the problem being the amount of trust required to make it work, and if people sign up and then drop out, we'd never raise enough to ever make it happen! (I was involved in a similar "lets club together" idea on a forum for PIC microprocessing and after months of looking really positive, it slowly went down the tubes)
I will be going ahead with a purchase in Feb (hopefully before then) and will be able to offer low-volume production runs soon after (once I'm familiar with the hardware!)
#31500 - keldon - Sat Dec 11, 2004 12:46 pm
| blinky465 wrote: |
| qwertycho wrote: | | I imagine your (sic) getting these carts from some hong kong pirater. How do you have these connections to get blank flash carts, I'm sure nintendo is not willing to sell them to the public. |
Well, I approached SimonB on this forum, who is running the GBA2004 competition - he is able to get hold of OTP carts in batches of 500 and they work out around ?4-?5 per cart for the first batch.
I've also been quoted ?8/cart supposedly direct from a supplier but I suspect that the company I contacted were acting as middle-man agents and adding their slice on top.
The carts are NOT Nintendo endorsed, and I did think about posting a request to see if a number of people wanted to club together to buy a box of carts and split the cost- the problem being the amount of trust required to make it work, and if people sign up and then drop out, we'd never raise enough to ever make it happen! (I was involved in a similar "lets club together" idea on a forum for PIC microprocessing and after months of looking really positive, it slowly went down the tubes)
I will be going ahead with a purchase in Feb (hopefully before then) and will be able to offer low-volume production runs soon after (once I'm familiar with the hardware!) |
1) Do you have any idea whether they can save yet
2) I've always though that people should pay before they join the list, especially with it only being ?5-8 per cart, but you shouldn't have too much of a problem getting sales in this scene
#31517 - bobrocks - Sat Dec 11, 2004 8:18 pm
If you wanted to get everyone together and purchase the items, just have everyone deposit a specified amount into an escrow account. Once all the money has been raised, the purchase can be completed. if certain people drop out, or enough people lose interest and back out, nobody has lost anything and nobody is stuck footing the bill. Just a thought! Almost like a preorder deal, plus it could prevent any ONE person having to foot the bill.
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#33755 - agsilva - Sat Jan 08, 2005 6:02 am
This sounds like a great idea but as many have asked, Do the carts support a save feature? Without one it becomes less appealing though still useful for certain applications.
Anyone recall the decision when acclaim (or was it activision) got sued by Atari and won (I think) back in the old days :)? I know avoiding a legal discussion was mentioned but small time publishing (even at cost) is an interesting topic.
#33756 - tepples - Sat Jan 08, 2005 6:22 am
| agsilva wrote: |
| Anyone recall the decision when acclaim (or was it activision) got sued by Atari and won (I think) back in the old days :)? |
Wrong plaintiff, but right first syllable of defendant. You're thinking of Sega v. Accolade, which has even been largely affirmed post-DMCA in Lexmark v. Static Control Components. To find previous discussion of the case on gbadev.org, search the board for "accolade".
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#34029 - blinky465 - Wed Jan 12, 2005 8:53 pm
Finally, I've managed to find a supplier of carts.
I'm putting together a website over the coming week, to allow users to upload roms and place an order to have them written to cartridge.
It's early days, and I've yet to work out the final details (postage costs etc being the main headache, from the supplier to me for the carts, then from me to you guys out there...)
Anyway, watch out for an announcement in the news section.
To begin with, carts will be:
32Mbit (games up to 4Mb) rewriteable (flash based) with SRAM.
Expect prices to be in the region of ?4-?5 per cart (inc postage within UK) which is around $8 + p&p for our US friends!
(calm down, Sweden, you'll be getting comparible prices in euros!)
If anyone needs larger carts (geez, how big is your game??!) they can be sourced, but because I need to order in volume, there may be a slight delay and increased cost (I'll try to keep this to a minimum).
So - who's interested?
#34043 - sgeos - Wed Jan 12, 2005 10:56 pm
I'd be interested if I had a game to put on a cart. In a week I won't even have a computer. =)
Glad to hear your service is going to be a go!
-Brendan
#34057 - Abscissa - Thu Jan 13, 2005 3:27 am
Whoa. I thought they were going to be write-once chips. How'd you manage to get such a low per-unit price on re-writable flash carts? Is it just because they're much smaller capacity than the usual 128-512Mbit stuff and bought in bulk? Or are they just not "flash carts" in the usual sense and can only be re-flashed by taking the chip out of the cart and making special circuitry?
#34081 - blinky465 - Thu Jan 13, 2005 9:51 am
| Abscissa wrote: |
| Is it just because they're much smaller capacity than the usual 128-512Mbit stuff and bought in bulk? |
That's the basic jist of it, yes. I spoke to a few suppliers in HK/China and only one of them could come up with write-once carts. And they were ?4/piece + p&p and he couldn't guarantee further supplies after my first order of 250.
I've been told that doubling the capacity roughly doubles the cost of production (a little bit more to start up a production run) and it seems that hardly anyone is using 64mbit chips.
My hardware *can* write to 128Mbit carts (nothing bigger I'm afraid) but it would cost a fortune for me to order a quantity of 128mit carts, so I'm sticking to the cheaper 32Mbit ones for now.
(also, the suppliers seem keener on pushing the low capacity ones for development, as it is easier for them - and us - to show that they're not being used to pirate commercial games!)
edit: they are rewriteable flash carts upto 10,000 times (nothing special, the usual flash stuff) - I don't know if any other linker/hardware can be used with them just yet, but the kit I've ordered read/write/deletes to and from them just fine.
#34261 - gb_feedback - Sun Jan 16, 2005 7:46 pm
| Quote: |
| (calm down, Sweden, you'll be getting comparible prices in euros!) |
FYI they use Kronor in Sweden - not Euros!
Actually if they are flash I'd be interested in a few as I could probably program them myself (my company does programmers). At that sort of price I could afford to *keep* books on carts, rather than erasing them after use.
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#34266 - blinky465 - Sun Jan 16, 2005 9:05 pm
Sweden? Don't I feel silly... I was just discussing with my friend (from Southern Ireland; it took about an hour for us to understand three sentences each!) about Sweden opting out of the single monetary thing as I posted the last message (and now feel incredibly stupid). He was saying how much he hated the euro....
I think it better to stick to prices in GBP and let you guys do your own conversions if you want to buy some carts.
anyway, back to the update.
I've a couple of cart samples being posted tomorrow (Mon) - as I understand the carts are regular multi-write flash carts. Hopefully I'll have these by the end of the week and will be able to put a final price on the service.
#34269 - Lord Graga - Sun Jan 16, 2005 9:18 pm
If I have the ability to rewrite these myself, and I can order them at $4-5 + postage, then I would like 10 :)
#59137 - mojo - Sat Oct 29, 2005 1:19 pm
Have you got any further with this yet and do you have any cartridges available ?
#59255 - MrD - Sun Oct 30, 2005 7:46 pm
You're the man, basically.
I'd love a fistful of carts! Hope this works out well for ya!
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#82644 - Lini - Mon May 08, 2006 2:06 am
I would take 7-10, once I get my game working.
#82774 - hamilton - Tue May 09, 2006 5:08 pm
any advances (pun not intended) in the blank cart dealership??
me wanty!
heh...
#89614 - misterDtD - Sun Jun 25, 2006 8:05 pm
I was wondering, where do you get your carts.
And, I would be interested... once I make my first decent game >.<
I'm new to GBA dev.
~DtD
#166380 - hacker013 - Fri Feb 06, 2009 6:14 pm
do you still sell them?
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#166383 - gauauu - Fri Feb 06, 2009 8:30 pm
Most likely he doesn't. The best place I've found to get carts is the site referred to here:
http://forum.gbadev.org/viewtopic.php?t=14429