Commander X16

I would like a Flash Cartridge with an SD Card Slot!

— Dasian Williams (age 16)

Why? There's an SD slot on the motherboard.

The flash cart makes sense, and a RAM cart is going to be a great way to build your own "multi-game cart."

But there's no need for an SD card on the cart, since you have one on the motherboard.

I think the idea is that the card can copy data down from the SD card into the flash similar to super cartridges for old consoles that could configure themselves as one of hundreds of cartridges. (I would use SRAM instead of flash to avoid the problem of wear.)

For the X16, this doesn't make much sense, at least not yet, since there is only one cartridge in existence and it copies the data from the cartridge into low RAM before running it.

Yeah, I have two three SNES and NES Flash carts, and they are actually three different things in one.

There’s a simple SD card reader, an FPGA, some ROM, and a bunch of RAM. When you first boot the cartridge, the ROM is visible to the CPU, and the cart’s management software runs. The management program can copy data from files on the flash card over to RAM or flash ROM on the cart.

The FPGA is there to provide mappers and extra features that were implemented on game carts. Most games had hardware to bank switch, and some games had extra processing or even battery backed RAM for saving games.

So obviously none of that is required for the X16. This leaves us with… “there already is a flash ROM cart. We are just waiting for TexElec to start selling it.”