[Question] Reproduction Carts, how hard to make?

Well we all know that there are some games that are just impossible to come by, and im not one of those colectors that is willing to spent 200€ or 150€ for a megadrive/genesis game,so that got me wondering in those reproduction carts, yeah i know that isnt the same has having an original cart but for games, like megaman wily wars and Probotector, they are almost impossible to have, so i ask here how can i do a repro cart, and how hard it is, i have some knowledge on electronics but is there any kind of tutorial, not just for megadrive/genesis games, but also for the 32x games.

Thank you for your help.

EDIT: 12/06/2010

Sorry guys in bumping this old post, but sinse i opened this one i might as well use it, here is the thing in the last weeks, i have been looking for various places to burn my Epprom chips, i even asked here in the forum, and on stores, other forums etc, so i could find the cheapest place, i have decided to go with the site that "0x15e" recomended Hobbyroms.com, 10$ with shiping seems a good deal, at least was the best i could find, but before i ordered, i got a question, i have downloaded some roms, for my repros namly, MegaMan, sonic megamix and Darxide, now each one of these games comes in 3 diferent file formats .gen, .bin and .32x, and as i dont want the guys on the store to burn me a bad chip, i ask here, if i have to convert these files to a specific file, and if so how can i do that.
One last thing, in the future i would like to burn games that are region locked, is there a way to change the region of roms so that they can become region free, or change them to the region of my mega drive?

Also i wanted to thank all the guys on the forum that have helped me out on this quest.

PS: FFantasy6 you are the king of repros XD.

The biggest difficulty is in the making of the boxart and cart label. All else is quite easy if you got some soldering skill and equipment for memory burning.

why does everyone say burning when talking about writing memory to a rom/ram ?

Burning is the official term since the invention of PROM chips

really? learn somin new everyday cheers for clearing that up :D

Lets all go BURN some memory chips ^^

Burning applies more to storing info in a chip that retains its data, like PROM, EPROM, Flash... for RAMs and seemingly EEPROMs, word "write" is used instead, probably since its a "free" action requiring no meaningful preparation.

In my experience with attempting things like this, there isn't a tutorial to teach you how to "burn" roms. If you're completely new to this you'd be better off buying a flash cart.

Burning roms consists of you buy yourself a EPROM programmer and then using its software to burn a ROM on the EPROM chip you bought earlier... you need 16bit wide chips for MD, like 27C100, 27C200, 27C400, 27C800, 27C160, 27C322...

The label and box art is the least of the problems, with some patience it goes ok, now my real problem is the buring the chip, has i dont have an epprom programer, if i could by the chip already burned, that would be great, because i have soldering skills.

some sellers do sell the chips preprogrammed, and ask little extra for that...

I really don't see the point of making reproduction cartridges. If you want to play a game that bad, emulation is always an option. It's actually a fair bit less illegal (depending on where you live, not illegal at all) than making a reproduction cart.

If you demand to play the game on the original hardware, a flash cart is a much better option. If you care about authenticity, the real deal is the only way to go. Reproductions serve only one logical purpose as far as I'm concerned; scamming. It's fairly easy to make a quick buck by selling fake copies of extremely rare games as the real thing. I don't think anyone here condones this, myself included.

I have to ask, why do you want to make reproductions as opposed to using a flash cart?

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Originally Posted by XeroShinobi

It's fairly easy to make a quick buck by selling fake copies of extremely rare games as the real thing.

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Ding ding ding ding.

I'm not against people creating reproduction games, in principle - but what I would do would be to place a small, transparent 'REPRODUCTION' mark somewhere on the cartridge label and box. You know, so there's no niggling little temptation to offload it onto some eBay schmuck when you get bored of the thing and get a cheaper flash cartridge :)

I was actually going to do this for darxide. I found someone who owned the game and could scan everything for me, and I was going to use a Doom cart as a donor cart. The only problem is I can't find a 16bit memory chip that can support darxide's 3mb compasity.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by XeroShinobi

I really don't see the point of making reproduction cartridges. If you want to play a game that bad, emulation is always an option. It's actually a fair bit less illegal (depending on where you live, not illegal at all) than making a reproduction cart.

If you demand to play the game on the original hardware, a flash cart is a much better option. If you care about authenticity, the real deal is the only way to go. Reproductions serve only one logical purpose as far as I'm concerned; scamming. It's fairly easy to make a quick buck by selling fake copies of extremely rare games as the real thing. I don't think anyone here condones this, myself included.

I have to ask, why do you want to make reproductions as opposed to using a flash cart?

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its not about authenticity, its more like collecting, if you cant have the real deal, but if you want the clossest you can get, repros are the way to go. thats my opinion

Quote:

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Originally Posted by konio38

its not about authenticity, its more like collecting, if you cant have the real deal, but if you want the clossest you can get, repros are the way to go. thats my opinion

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A homemade repro has 0 collectors value; it's not like a bootleg. I don't know, the reasoning behind legitimate reproduction "collecting" doesn't make sense to me. The only exceptions are reproductions that translate text in a game originally only available in Japanese or something. But even then, an emulator or flash cart is still a better option.

In my opinion, the less fakes out there, the better. If you do make some reproductions, I highly suggest you take the advice mentioned by Elusive and mark them as such.