nesdev.com

Hello,
we are working on creating our own game boy games and wanna manufacture them.
My part is at the moment getting the pcb ready and the components, i made everything except the "damn" Mbc5.

I thought im not the only one who got that problem and maybe u have some links or informations to easy replace the mbc5 with a xilinx/Altera/somethingelse which is ready for use. Some open source projects or something like that are available?

There are some flash carts out there, i think they made it to reproduce the memory bank controller.

It would really save us a big time if we find some help, we do this project for fun but we would pay some money if it is necessary to get code/instruction for a replacement.

Its not really funny programming a game without the option to let it manufacture because of the lack of the mbc...

Thanks for reading this!
Regards
Benjamin

You can clone the MBC using a common CPLD device.

I think Benjamin was looking to hire someone to write the Verilog to clone the MBC5 on a suitable CPLD.

The MBC5 isn't really all that complicated. This reference along with this C++ implementation should be more than sufficient to pull it off. xzakox apparently got his working after I started talking about his old abandoned thread and then he showed up here out of nowhere, but after reporting success, he fell off the face of the earth again and never released his complete VHDL code. This next school year, I plan to finally get around to getting my cart design manufactured so I can write my own Verilog, but that will probably have to wait until I find a new job, since I just lost the one I had, and PCB's aren't exactly in the budget right now.

To help get you started, I've looked into the different chips available, and I came to the same conclusion that xzakox did in terms of part choice, specifically the Xilinx XC9536. It's an obsolete part, but the replacement XC9536XL is 5v tolerant (though it's a 3.3v part). So, if you're planning to go into mass-production, you probably want to go 3.3v anyway, because it's pretty nearly impossible to find 5v parts anymore in the sizes you'll want. So, if you go 3.3v, Micron makes good Flash ROMs in 32/64Mbit sizes, and you can get Fe-RAM from Cypress up to 1Mbit with an 8-bit data bus (up to 4Mbit with a 16-bit data-bus, but you'd have to multiplex the data bus), then you wouldn't need a battery.

http://pastebin.com/c1SyhLEn
This is the unfinished version of David Pello's MBC5 clone for the XC9536. I'm not sure if it's working, but it could serve as a good reference if someone is thinking of making one.