Backstory: Having always thought I probably wouldn't be into the WarioWare games, but then constantly seeing them near the top of best GBA games lists when I got my Micro, I've been playing the first WarioWare game and really enjoying it - and am almost done with it. I'd like to try WarioWare Twisted, but a) it was never released in Europe, b) I can't read Japanese, c) American carts of it are expensive. I could try playing it emulated on Switch with motion controls, or play the Japanese cart and miss out on I don't know how much, but maybe a fun electronics project could result in a better solution.
Plan: buy cheap Japanese version of the game (Mawaru Made in Wario), flash American ROM of the game to a suitable ROM chip, replace the ROM chip in the Japanese cart. My soldering skills are not currently up to this task, but I've bought new kit and improving my skills is already a separate plan. So the next steps of this specific plan involve identifying the chip on the cart and finding a flashable chip that would work in its place.
I found a nice clear photo on ebay of the American cartridge PCB, hopefully the Japanese one would be the same.
The smaller chip is FRAM for saves, and the larger one is the maskrom. Googling the number starting with MX finds lots of places to buy it, but not a great deal of tech spec info, but the number "128" is in there which agrees with interweb data that the game is 128Megabit (16MegaByte). So ideally we want a 128Mbit flash rom (or maybe larger capacity would work) that has the same physical dimensions and pinouts - tho equivalent pinouts in a different physical form could potentially be managed with an ugly wiring job, hopefully that won't be needed.
Anyone know how I'd go about trying to find that? If there are good starting points for research it could cut down a lot of time on random googling. Would the same chip with the aforementioned MX number work and be flashable?
A really convenient outcome might be if there happened to be a bootleg game cart that contained an appropriate chip, that could be flashed with one of the known bootleg-cart-flashing methods, and then the chip transferred, but a loose chip and separate flashing hardware are an option too (I already have raspberry pis, and the other gadgets that are used for flashing are likely to be useful for other things in future).
This might turn out to be unrealistic, but it has the potential to be a nerdy project I'll enjoy doing (and contribute to my general plan of working on my soldering/electronics skills), and if I give up on it I'll still have the cart to play the game in Japanese.
Plan: buy cheap Japanese version of the game (Mawaru Made in Wario), flash American ROM of the game to a suitable ROM chip, replace the ROM chip in the Japanese cart. My soldering skills are not currently up to this task, but I've bought new kit and improving my skills is already a separate plan. So the next steps of this specific plan involve identifying the chip on the cart and finding a flashable chip that would work in its place.
I found a nice clear photo on ebay of the American cartridge PCB, hopefully the Japanese one would be the same.
Anyone know how I'd go about trying to find that? If there are good starting points for research it could cut down a lot of time on random googling. Would the same chip with the aforementioned MX number work and be flashable?
A really convenient outcome might be if there happened to be a bootleg game cart that contained an appropriate chip, that could be flashed with one of the known bootleg-cart-flashing methods, and then the chip transferred, but a loose chip and separate flashing hardware are an option too (I already have raspberry pis, and the other gadgets that are used for flashing are likely to be useful for other things in future).
This might turn out to be unrealistic, but it has the potential to be a nerdy project I'll enjoy doing (and contribute to my general plan of working on my soldering/electronics skills), and if I give up on it I'll still have the cart to play the game in Japanese.
Last edited by hippy dave,
