NES Funky Flash Cart

Whilst working on the Sega Megadrive cart, I ended up searching the net for other cart projects for various game consoles and eventually stumbled across Arto Hatanpää’s Funky Flash Cart (FFC) for the 8-bit Nintendo Entertainment System. I contacted Arto about the cart a few weeks ago; as he still had some boards from the initial prototype batch on his hands he was willing to sell one to recoup some of the manufacturing costs. Parts weren’t hard to source either; lucky for me Arto had extras of some of the chips and was kind enough to sell those to me along with the PCB. The NES lockout chip and the cartridge case I recycled from a damaged cartridge bought second-hand for a few euros. So, I had the board assembled almost in no-time:

As the FFC circuit board is bigger than the original and has a USB connector for loading ROM images, the cartridge case needed a bit of modding. There were some towers and side supports that needed to be trimmed flat and the USB connector needed a cutout. Luckily the board itself fit inside the gripping part that is used to pull the cart out of a NES, the cart would’ve sure looked kinda sucky if that part would’ve had to be removed altogether.

Just to decorate the final cartridge a bit, I designed and printed a sticker label for it. For this, I aligned a picture of the PCB as if there was a see-through / window on the cart itself. If you wish to print one for your own cartridge, my design can be downloaded here. The finished cart:

Present Day Update: Arto’s old page seems to have vanished off the net, but I’m hosting a copy of his site under my own page here, just to have it archived somewhere online. Links won’t work of course. There’s also a page about this cart at NESWorld, they hosts all the firmware and other documents/files needed to build/use one of these carts. My old assembling instructions I wrote to thank Arto for this creating this neat little gadget are there as well :)

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