We are pleased to announce the nileswan - 49bitcat’s new flash cartridge, compatible with the WS/WSC family of consoles, as well as the PCv2. It is the result of over two years of research and development with the goal of bringing both users and homebrew developers the ultimate cartridge solution for the platform.
Here are some of its standout features:
- Loading programs from a FAT16/FAT32 storage card
- Support for WS/WSC programs up to 16 MiB in size
- Support for the following peripherals:
- SRAM (up to 512 KiB) and EEPROM (up to 2 KiB) saves
- NOR flash and RTC (real time clock) emulation
- 3-axis accelerometer for homebrew to use
- USB port for development, including WW support
- Upgradeable, open source firmware and software, enabling future feature additions
- Hard gold cartridge contacts for improved longevity
- Recovery button - allows fixing some WSC/SC consoles with internal EEPROM corruption
- Extensive developer documentation
In practice this means the nileswan opens up completely new doors for WS/WSC platform research and homebrew development while also having very good software compatibility, including first-class WW support. No patches required!
For further information check out its dedicated page.
We know many of you have been curious about the cartridge’s pricing and availability. With this announcement, we are finally making it public - nileswan will sell for 85 EUR (excluding shipping, taxes and import duties). The first batch will be available for purchase via shop.49bitcat.com starting at the 24th of November 2025 at 16:00 GMT in December 2025 / January 2026, with future batches planned depending on demand. More details will be avaliable at a later date.
We hope you will enjoy playing with and developing for nileswan as much as we enjoyed creating it!