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I picked up a thin client from Goodwill for $15. New enough to have USB & run Windows XP, old enough to have hardware serial/parallel ports, no WiFi, so easy to airgap. I have it running all my programmers: Data I/O 29B, GQ-4x4, and Bung flash linker. I couldn't get the Bung to work with ECP/EPP mode, so it's maybe a bit slower than it could be, but it works fine other than that.

I think you're confusing Mastas, I don't think Brian (NeoSaveMasta, NeoBIOSMasta etc) has anything to do with the NeoFlashMasta. There were two NFMs made, the first one was a dock you plugged the cart into, and it could also dump official carts. That version is NLA. The current one, you plug a USB cable directly into the flash cart.

Quick heads up. The ROM for Delta Warp in the MAME/MESS romset doesn't work right. It gives a save error after the first level. I dumped my copy, and that works fine. So it's a bad dump. The MAME dump is .5m, while the real cart is 1m, so I think the second half is empty, and someone trimmed them off. But, saves go there & because the SD cart sees a 512k image, you can't write in that area. Just thought folks would like to know.

Looks like it's for a NGP snapcase. Packaging varies quite a bit, but many Japanese NGP releases came in a very sturdy hard plastic case with the art as an insert.

Looking pretty good. The flashing speed is about the same as the Bung copier. NFM is faster, but you only get two games (with a hardware switch), and smaller-meg games don't work without patching. What are the chances of an update which skips the splashscreen when the system initially boots? I put together a patcher which skips it for all the games I have to play, but it would be nice if the initial boot of the flash cart bypassed it as well.

Yeah, ability to power the console off is a feature. I believe CfC does this when you save your game. I have the later (no dock) FlashMasta and a Bung flash cart, I'll see whether that multi-ROM works on those or not. PocketSend has the ability to combine ROMs and flash onto the Bung cart. I don't know how it works, but it's very slow to load games, so I haven't used it after trying it out. Site says I'm in position #1 for my preorder... I'll be over here smashing the refresh button all day.

How will save games work? Presumably they don't change the original ROM. If I dump an official cart with a save game using my Bung linker, then flash it, my progress is there when I boot it up. Will I be able to extract the save data from that image & put it somewhere on the SD card? Or do I have to dump my carts with saves & use those images instead of clean ones?

Oh, this is really nice to know. I noticed that the boot splash is skipped on CFC depending on the game save state. If you power down in the middle of a battle, you get brought right back to it, but if you save on the map, it splashes and you have to continue from the main menu. So there might be other ways to get past the splash.

Found this today. Has anyone seen the 06-01-83 version before? Looks like it may be undumped based on http://www.atariprotos.com/2600/software/bigbird/bigbird.htm Any guidance on value for this cart? I'm more into coin-op stuff, so not sure what it's worth.

No.

Thanks for the feedback. I fucking love swearing.

This is so great. I had no idea that Moppet/Enter-Tech had anything going on in VanWa. pwalters, if you have any other stories/photos/art/manuals/anything from the old days, I'd love to see/hear it. I'm lucky to have a Pirate Treasure machine. I got it complete / non-working and repaired the PCB. Knowing that it was a clone of Leprechaun which was a clone of Pot of Gold, I was able to use the schematics in the GPI Pot of Gold manual to figure out what was wrong and fix it. I also have a Tugboat marquee and PCB I need to repair.