Yea I know I’ve said I think SPC sound is kinda sucky, but this should at least be funny for some mode 7 visuals at your next chip rave.
Details:
SDRAM and DMA are used for fast game loading so you can play in seconds. This means a quick cycle for homebrew development. Now you can see your creation on real hardware instead of relying on emulators. In cart support for the DSP1 chip lets you play games like Super Mario Kart that are missing from some other SNES products. Huge 128Mbit memory means even the largest games can be played without buying hard to find memory expansions. Versatile memory mapping runs games correctly without FastROM hacking or RAM mirroring problems.
Standard FAT16 or FAT32 formatted carts are used so there is no special software to load games onto the card. Organize your games in folders any way you want for faster browsing. Compact Flash is used instead of something else like SD for maximum speed. The SNES processor is the bottleneck so the parallel CF card is around 10 times faster than the serial SD card.
The entire PowerPak system is updateable for future additions and bug fixes. All loading files are stored on the CF card for easy upgrading. Just download the most recent Mappers file below, unzip, then copy the folder to the root of your CF card. The boot ROM is socketed for easy reflashing but this will hopefully never be needed. If it is needed and you do not have a programmer, you just pay the shipping to get your SNES PowerPak here and I will reflash then mail it back free.
via RetroZone.
Okay. heres my input as a second time buyer, and as someone long in the scene who bought a Professor sf2 brand new in the box way back when.
I knew about the psf2 long before i knew what an emulator was. Their local distributor, Carl industries was located in Miami, a stones throw away from where i lived in Fort Lauderdale, and they advertized heavily locally. anyhow, i ran my doctor into the ground.
It finally quit working in 2007 and ive been looking for a replacement since.
one thing that became iritating later on as the years went by was that the doctor had its own file format and it was very very picky about file structure wanting every bit in the right place. also during the same period when emus started making inroads, you were running super Pasofami wich really couldnt run any game correctly, and it was also very picky about what it would run. on the other hand if you worked out the technicalities of file format and pickiness for a game, the doctor would run it absolutely perfectly on real hardware. it always did so.
With that said, ive been an nes powerpak owner going on a couple of years now, and retro usb really has achived the impossible.
The nes powerpak will run anything you throw at it except for MMC5 with minimal time spent at all making sure everything is right. It is a godsend to nes fans simply because nothing quite as good has been avalible up to this time for nes fans.
So with confidence, i ordered a snes powerpak as soon as it became available, and my initial review isnt good.
i thought the doctor sf7 was picky for carts i didnt dump myself, with all of the editing to them, etc just to get them to run right.
I cant get any smc or doctor sf3, sf7 files that i so painstainky edited back in the day just for that system, nothing. nothing will run at all on my snes powerpak, not even the dsp1 test that was included.
something is very wrong here.
Now that’s a cliffhanger.