Golden Game 150 in 1




Cartridge Front




Cartridge Board, Front


What Is It?

A fairly good 150 in 1 multicart. Has the usual complement of NROM titles, however there are other titles hacked extensively to function with the mapper hardware- Dr. Mario is an MMC1 game, yet they have hacked it to run on this multi.

The Games:

About 60 or so.

The Tech:

Very simple cart, electronically. 2 ROMs containing the games, and an 8K VRAM along with mirroring control and mapping hardware done up in 4 TTL chips. The menu loads the CHR RAM before starting a game; most of the games on here used CHR ROMs. Some games need to bank the CHR ROM (CNROM titles) and they have hacked the code up so it reloads the VRAM.



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This mapper has been assigned the number 235.  (that's 235 decimal)

It is the weirdest multicart I have ever seen.  There are only 60 or so
games which can be expected, however there's an integrated "trainer"
setup, some "demos", and other weird crap.  The menu screen has Adventure
Island music and graphics.  Instead of a PRG ROM, this cart uses a single
8K VRAM and it loads the graphics into RAM before/during gameplay!
All the games have been hacked, so when they wish to switch out CHR ROM,
it will load in a new set of GFX!

The mapper hardware itself is very simple, only 4 TTL chips.  This particular
board has space for 4 ROM chips, however only 2 are filled.

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There is no CHR ROM, there is only 8K VRAM.  This particular cart has space
for up to 4Mbytes of ROMs but only 2Mbytes have been stuffed.

Reads:
8000-BFFF:  Lower 16K ROM bank
C000-FFFF:  Upper 16K ROM bank


Writes:
8000-FFFF:  Control register (See below)

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How to work it good:

Like other multicarts, the address written to is used instead of the
actual data written.

The bits are set up like so:

(A15)          (A0)

1xMP RNBB xxxA AAAA

A15 must be 1 (obviously)
x = don't care
R = ROM page size (0=16K, 1=32K)
P = ROM page # (0=lower 16K, 1=upper 16K)
M = Mirroring control (0=H 1=V)
N = Mirroring control (0=2 screens 1=1 screen) (see below)
B = ROM # (A8=bit 0, A9=bit 1) (32K pages)
A = Upper ROM address lines (aka 32K pages. A0=bit 0, A1=bit 1, etc.)

The Mirroring Control bit (N) is sorta cool.  It allows one to make
"single screen" games where there is only 1K of nametable RAM, so all
4 quadrants of the scrollable screen are the same thing.

The B bits are the ROM enable bits.  This cart can have up to 4 1Mbyte
ROM chips, however only 2 are used.  So the only valid selections are
ROM 0 and ROM 2.  (i.e.:  00b = ROM 0, 10b = ROM 1)

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There is no CHR ROM on this board, so no emulation of it is required.



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