Hacking Oldies Can you re-flash N64 Action Replay Professional Cheat Cartridges on Windows 10

[Kodewerx]

Hey all, you can reflash any N64 Gameshark or Action replay using a sanni cart reader (your forum won’t let me link to it but it’s on GitHub and you can Google it)

Also I’m the guy whose GitHub that was linked earlier. I’ve fully reverse engineered the N64 gameshark/Action Replay GAL and implemented it into an Altera CPLD. That is all open source there, including the POF necessary to program the altera. There’s also a copy of every firmware I’ve been able to find for N64 Gameshark in the clone repository. You can use those to flash and revive dead GameSharks. The firmwares for the other cheat devices are also available in their repositories, but I haven’t had time yet to finish cloning those cpld/fpga’s. It’s on my to-do list.

 

[NES_player4life]

Hey all, you can reflash any N64 Gameshark or Action replay using a sanni cart reader (your forum won’t let me link to it but it’s on GitHub and you can Google it)

Yes, You can even flash AR firmware to a GS.
I was one of the first to do this.
Before flashing always backup the data first. In addition you can upgrade and even downgrade. Please don't update early gems. 1.x as these are rare.

Firmware should be 256kb in size. Not more however I have flashed a working <100kb in my tests.

Edit: 10 year post

 

[Kodewerx]

Yes, You can even flash AR firmware to a GS.
I was one of the first to do this.
Before flashing always backup the data first. In addition you can upgrade and even downgrade. Please don't update early gems. 1.x as these are rare.

Firmware should be 256kb in size. Not more however I have flashed a working <100kb in my tests.

Edit: 10 year post

Speaking of early gems, the earliest firmware I have available is V1.02. I believe there are v1.01 and v1.03, and if anyone has those and is willing to dump the firmware, I’d be eternally grateful.

The firmware size is dependent on the size of the eeproms in the Gameshark. A dump is just the entirety of the eeproms to include empty portions of them as well. Most GameSharks came with 1 MBit eeproms, hence most dumps being 256KB in size. You could reduce the file size by removing padding from the ends of the file. That being said, some Gamesharks come with SST 28LF040 4 MBit eeproms, and the dump size will be 1 MB for those ones. The files can be reduced safely by removing the padding.