shawnleblanc wrote:
Are they any good?
They are great.
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Are they generally recommended for development?
They are marketed that way, but not really. Having to move the CF card back and forth between the PowerPak and the PC is not practical at all. Also, the boot ROM alters the state of the console, so it's not exatly the same as if the NES booted straight to your program (i.e. you may forget to initialize something in your program but you won't realize that because the PowerPak boot menu that ran before DID initialize it). another issue is that even though the program itself is running on hardware, the mappers are still "emulated", and a lot of them don't behave 100% like the real ones.
As I see it, the PowerPak is more of a device to play pirate ROMs than a development tool, but it's still of some use for development. Moving the CF card around is still faster than reprogramming ROM chips, and for the simpler mappers it doesn't really matter that they are emulated.
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Are they still being made?
I think so.
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Are there any alternatives?
Some members of this forum appear to be designing a couple of new carts, but I don't think any of them are as complete as the PowerPak. The obvious alternative is for you to build your own devcarts by installing sockets on different Nintendo-made carts and buying an EPROM programmer and flashROMs. This is the most authentic way to test your software on a real NES, but is not very practical.