Cybergoth, on Fri Sep 16, 2005 4:49 PM, said:
Also Interesting to me (as an electronics idiot) is, that there's just one single chip on the H.E.R.O PCB . At least I thought there had to be more parts involved for an 8K binary?
There are no 'off the shelf' parts which will act as an 8K bankswitched cart. On the other hand, the logic required for bank switching is simple enough that companies making a lot of games have no problem engineering a single chip which does everything necessary.
If you buy a game from Albert, the code will be stored in a field-programmable memory device (most likely either an EPROM or an OTP). The chip manufacturers don't have to involve itself with the game code. They just supply blank chips to a distributor, who then supplies them to Albert. He then programs the games as necessary.
Field-programmable memory devices are wonderful, but they used to be pretty expensive. If one needed to get many copies of a chip made, it was much cheaper to order "mask ROMs" directly from the factory. These chips have the game's code physically hard-wired into them (a sufficiently-detailed X-ray could read it out). Such chips were and are something of a pain for the manufacturer to deal with so manufacturers normally wouldn't even bother with any order below about 10,000 pieces.
If a game is going to use field-programmable memory, it would be outrageous for the game company to call the chip manufacturer and say "Could you give us a few hundred EPROMS that are just like the other ones, but with different chip-select logic?" On the other hand, if a game company is already ordering tens of thousands of custom chips, asking for a tiny bit more customization is no big deal.
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