Some time has passed, and a new version of the cartridge from MFides (built by Pablibiris) has shown up. Since a few large ROM images for MSX have piled up in the meantime, deciding to buy this card — despite already owning a couple of Carnivore 2s and other cartridges — was a pretty easy call.
Quick refresher on what it does:
SCC (Konami) sound emulation AY (in this case Yamaha) sound emulation, plus a mix of both together with the above SCC output on an external stereo jack this time, 8MB of space to fill with a ROM file
The known "hmm" — the potential downsides:
the programming tool requires MSXDOS 2, so machines with less memory (say, Japanese MSX2 units) might feel a bit left out. Of course using any RAM mapper/expansion, like the SD Mapper MegaRAM 512 I wrote about here, solves that problem. you need something to actually load these files from, and it probably won't be a 720K floppy if the files are bigger than its capacity — so you need some kind of card with hard-drive-like functionality. BeerIDE, the aforementioned SD Mapper MegaRAM 512, or other cards like Carnivore 2 or MegaFlashROM SCC+ SD. there's no simple software for building yourself a menu and keeping several games on the cartridge at once. That's probably the biggest downside for an average user.
Programming works the same as before, using YAMAFX.COM with the ROM file's name as a parameter, plus /S1 or /S2 depending on which slot your Yamanooto card sits in — with one important difference. You'll want YAMAFX.COM version 2.91 or newer; version 2.9, which I used with the 2MB Yamanooto, has trouble writing to the 8MB version of the card. Version 2.91 works fine with both the older and the newer cards.
TBA — a list of things that could fill up your 8MB Yamanooto cartridge for your own enjoyment.