Mythical Creature Spotted Outside China

Unicorn in the wild

I have to imagine the market for this device is pretty slim, but I’m willing to bet one Arch Nerd would be most interested indeed:

It has been almost 4 years since Neo Flash announced their 9th project: the Neo SNES Myth Cart. Many have been long awaiting its arrival and it is finally here.

This is no ordinary type of flash cartridge. It comes in two pieces that need to be combined together with an additional original SNES cartridge when running backup ROM images in the SNES console. The larger piece contains the logic chip, RAM, USB port, SNES cartridge slot, and GBA cartridge slot. A smaller cartridge containing the flash RAM chip is inserted into the GBA cartridge slot for storing and playing games.

There are a few differences between this and SNES backup solutions we have seen come about in the early til mid 1990s. The device is much more compact and almost the size of a typical SNES cartridge. It also does not have a plug for a separate power supply which means that you will need to use it in a deck that supplies enough power to run the cartridge on its own. On the top you will find a USB port to program the device. Most old copiers used a floppy drive and some had a parallel port built in or an external parallel attachment to program their built in RAM. Onboard, you will not find a handful of RAM chips or a microprocessor like in old copiers. There is one memory chip that you load the games to and a programmable logic chip that controls the device’s functions as well.

What it boils down to is this is a giant flash cart for your SNES that allows you to take ROMs and play them on said SNES rather than on an emulator. (I’m sure at least 80% of the people are now thinking ‘what’s the point, then?’, but it’s for the purists who want to play the games running 100% as-intended, since emulation is just that: an emulation, i.e. an approximation of the real thing, and not the actual, well, real thing.)

Anyway, the actual review is LONG but (extremely) informative if you’re in the market for one of these doodads. (Naturally, I’d guess Nintendo wouldn’t be a big fan of such a unit but in a world of rampant emulation, this is probably not going to give the Big N many sleepless nights.)

One important caveat should you fail to read this in its entirety: virtually¹ none of the games that use special, on-board, co-processors, work, e.g. the various FX/C4/Etc. chips (StarFox, Megaman X 2, etc.) will not, as yet, function, so caveat emptor. ()

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1 The DSP1 games like Super Mario Kart, Pilotwings, etc. do work.

Rockstar Rapes & Pillages…Pirates??

Rockstar: 1; Pirates: uh, 1?

Oh this is just too delicious on a number of levels:

Not sure if this has been mentioned anywhere, or if there is another reason for it, but it seem rockstar used a cracked version of Max Payne 2 for steam retail. Check out this picture:

[REPRODUCED ABOVE W/ HIGHLIGHTS]

As you can see there’s an ASCII “Myth” logo, which is an old cracking team that were quite prevelent a while back. Seems Rockstar got a little lazy and used this crack instead of recompilling their executable without DRM.

Note: The logo is much easier to see if you back away from it or just zoom out using by holding the ctrl key and spinning your mouse wheel.

Basically Rockstar, erm, appropriated some code from the pirates that cracked the original release of Max Payne 2 for their legit Steam release, so I guess what comes around goes around? Or something?

h/t: The Arch-Nerd