Nintendo 64 flash cart using a Raspberry Pi Pico / RP2040. So far, all of the work happens in the develop branch and is highly experimental. Follow kbeckmann on twitch and twitter to follow along while he's working on the project.

Join the Discord server to participate in the discussion and development of this project.

There are parallel projects currently:

• The lite version using one Raspberry Pi Pico board capable of booting homebrew
• The stamp version using one RP2040 Stamp from Solder Party. This is used as an experimental development platform for the next-gen version.
• The next-gen version which might have two RP2040 chips, on-board PSRAM chip supporting ROMs up to 64MB, a WiFi module and SD-card support. (This does not exist yet.)

The following concerns the lite version, unless noted.

Although PicoCart64 is still a very young project there are several people interested in contributing already. A PicoCart64-lite board is capable of loading up to 2MB ROMs on an unmodified N64 and unmodified Raspberry Pi Pico.

Note that currently this is a work-in-progress, and even the first version of the PCB has not been tested properly.

Check out the develop branch and navigate to hw/picocart64_v1_lite/. Compress the gerb_picocart64-lite_v1_2 to a .zip file.

Go to JLCPCB and make an account if you don't have one already. Push the Order now button in the top-right.

This takes you to the PCB configuration utility where you can upload the .zip file you just created. After uploading, you should see a rendered version of both sides of the PCB. If you want to produce a cheap cart for testing you can leave all settings as they are, except for this one:

❗ PCB Thickness needs to be set to 1.0mm, otherwise the cart won't fit in your console

❗ Note that this will result in a PCB with 90 degrees edges - the edge connector should be sanded down to get a nice 45 degree V shape. If this is not done, it may wear down your cart connector on the N64. The proper PCB order should be ENIG-RoHS + Gold Fingers + 45°finger chamfered, however this will result in a significant cost increase.

For building the lite version, you need the following parts along with the PCBs. Here we're assuming you want to assemble 5 boards, as that is the number of PCBs you'll be getting from JLCPCB as a minimum.

For the stamp design, these are needed. This list is not exhaustive, and still a WIP.

This is TODO until jchillerup has received his boards and has been able to snap some pictures.

The PCB is licensed under the following license: "CERN Open Hardware Licence Version 2 - Permissive" aka "CERN-OHL-P".

The software is licensed under BSD-2-Clause unless otherwise specified.