Hello Everyone! First of all, and most important, thanks to everyone who made this possible. Specially Vortex and rockbottom for the hard reverse engineering work, ack and ManCloud for their contributions to the project, rewrite for giving advice and sharing his experiences... Sorry if I miss someone, there are a lot of talented people in this thread.
I discovered this project a couple of weeks ago, sadly too late to buy a 161-in-1 v3 from Ali at a decent price, and the good old 161-in-1 v? cart I got a few years ago can be only used as donor (is the version that uses a F0095H0 chip for P ROMs). So a few days ago I decided to buy an used second-hand v3 from eBay, for several times the original price plus shipping, but I don't care, as I really want to do this project, both because is very nice to have a full set onto an insta-load flashcart, and the challenge of doing it yourself.
I read the 40 pages of this thread, and on the hardware side, is all very clear for me. I've been into electronics for many years, both professionally and as a hobby, I have the required tools and skills, and also done similar things in the past. Of course this is a very long and tedious process, so a lot of things can go wrong along the road, but in general terms I'm confident with the whole process. My only hardware related concern is that, to avoid scavenging my old 161-in-1, I ordered an spare F0095H0 from Ali. Reading this thread, seems very likely to be from a low quality/rejected batch, so I don't have big expectations on this. In worst case scenario, once I have the v3 working with 2gbytes, I will take one F0095H0 from my old 161, which is known to be good, and use it to make the full 3gbytes.
On the software side of things, while I wait for the v3 to arrive, I want to have it as clear an polished as I can. Right now I have mainly two questions. The first, and most important, regarding the CPLDs. I took the full game.txt from Vortex repo, with 161 games, and only modified it to sort the games alphabetically. VTXCart.exe generates all the files fine, without any error, but when I try to compile the CPLDs projects with Quartus, for "PROG_CP1" and "PROG_PCM2" I get an unable to fit error, so I have to change the optimization technique from Speed to Area to be able to compile it ("CHA_CP1" is already on Area, so no problem with this one, I guess). Unfortunately my knowledge on CPLDs and FPGAs is very limited, so I can't evaluate by myself is this represents any issues. Had anyone run into the same problem and can confirm that Area optimization is safe to use? It would be totally discouraging to have everything reprogrammed, just to find out the CPLDs are not working as they should, and have to start all over from the beginning.
My other software related question is about kof2000. It seems pretty clear that it is not possible to fit all the S tiles on only 128kb, so corruption is inevitable. Reading the whole thread, I have found two versions: kof2000b from the Vortex archive.org and Kof2000nrxfix from page 35. Tested both of them on MAME, and they both have S layer corruption, obviously, but Kof2000nrxfix seems a bit better, at least character selection screen and in-battle texts are more readable. Is there any other better option? if not, is there any reason to not use Kof2000nrxfix?
Once I have these two questions sorted, and I get my v3 cart, I will be ready to begin. I hope everything goes as smooth as possible. Thank to all you, I have a good perspective of all the things that can go wrong, and which parts require extreme caution.
Thanks for your help.
EDIT: I just received this today from Aliexpress, just 6 days after placing the order (is this a record?). It is the first part I have for this project, and the last one I'm going to use. It is not salvaged, as it still has gold plated pads, and visually it is in mint condition. Did anyone have any luck flashing one of this "supposedly new" chips from Ali? I Hope I didn't waste 20 bucks. It is going to be a long time until I can test it, I still have to order the programmers, PCBs, connectors...

