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Genesis ReWritable Cartdriges

Devil Ken Masters - Aug 27, 2001

		Devil Ken Masters	Aug 27, 2001
		I found, with the help of people of this forums, that: http://www.smspower.org/smsreader/... It explains how to build a Sega Master System Cartdrige Reader / Writer, with the utility of dumping games and writing roms into the ReWritable Cartrige (how to create it is explained too, of course) to playing the roms into the console. I want to ask if somebody knows the existance of another www with a similar thing for Genesis or Super Nintendo (the ReWritable Cartdrige I mean). Thanks

		IceDigger	Aug 28, 2001
		nope. Mike G (who did the SMS one) said he's working on a genny one, tho.. but expect it to be a bit more expensive than the SMS one.

		Service Games	Oct 2, 2001
		Making the RW cart for genny would be easy. It gets hard when you actualy want to use it with a pc to read and write carts.

		Mike G	Oct 2, 2001
		It's not inherently difficult. The primary problem (as Arakon mentioned) is expense - Flash is cheaper than SRAM but still expensive. Anyway, I have the MegaReader itself working, but no writable cartridges at present. I've had to suspend development of the project for a while, but eventually I'll have something to show for it - watch this space. Mike

		ExCyber	Oct 2, 2001
		Right - designing a readable Genesis cart is fairly easy, it's writing to it that's the hard part ... though far from impossible, it requires more circuitry than it really should since the PC was never intended to interface to that sort of thing through the standard I/O ports. I've also been working on a self-contained (i.e. no external writing hardware) Genesis flash cart design, but it's been slow going so far. Hopefully things will speed up a bit once I get the kinks worked out of my PCB etching process so I can actually start experimenting with the hardware... (Edited by ExCyber at 7:51 am on Oct. 2, 2001)

		megametalgreymon	Oct 2, 2001
		would it not be made easier by using the pc link cards designed for the action replay type devices (lik-sang sold them last time i looked) rather than a parallel port? just a thought

		ExCyber	Oct 2, 2001
		I don't have very good info on the PCCL interface. From what I've seen though, it could be very nice for interfacing a flash cartridge. Unfortunately, PCCL cards are getting harder to find, and AFAIK they were only ever made for ISA, which is quickly losing favor with mainboard manufacturers - most recent mainboards have no ISA slots at all .

		Service Games	Oct 3, 2001
		what he said ^^^

		Kamalot	Oct 18, 2001
		Is it possible to make a cartridge that has a slot for Compact Flash cards? That way you could load the ROM onto the CF card and plug the card into the cartridge. Just a wild idea. Not sure how those things really work.

		ExCyber	Oct 18, 2001
		If someone's willing to do the design work, CF might be a reasonable medium to load ROM images from (and it could be nice to be able to have bunch of games on CF instead of requiring a PC to load from), but from what I've seen it can't be used as a compatible replacement for standard flash or SRAM - its logical interface is actually based on ATA/IDE.