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How much memory on the 32x

jaystar - May 18, 2002

		jaystar		May 18, 2002
			the 32x aprears to have 2 memory chips 2x toshiba - tc511664bj-80 i assume there 80 ns chips any one have any tech info about them? if you guys need any more 32x chip name or info , tell me because I got some broken ones that im messing around with for fun

		Arakon		May 18, 2002
			Toshiba TC511664BJ-80, 40pin 1mByte D-Ram 1mb x 8

		jaystar		May 18, 2002
			thanks alot bro , its got 2 of thoese bad boys when you plug a megadrive game into the 32x. does it just pass threw the 32x. or is 32x hardware activated. also how does the 32x tell the diffrence between what kinda game is pluged into it. i.e 32x / megadrive do you know how much the 32x relises on the genesis hardware. how far is 32x from being its own system , Ie what does it need from genesis when playing a 32x game. also does any one have any hardware docs , shamatics about the 32x, i got something up my sleve , i got a pile of working and broken ones along with several genesis units

Arakon

May 18, 2002

	
	
		
		
			when you plug a megadrive game into the 32x.



does it just pass threw the 32x. or is 32x hardware activated.

straight passthrough.

	
	
		
		
			also how does the 32x tell the diffrence between what kinda game is pluged into it. i.e 32x / megadrive

by checking the header. hardware-wise, 32X and Genny carts are absolutely identical.

	
	
		
		
			do you know how much the 32x relises on the genesis hardware. how far is 32x from being its own system , Ie what does it need from genesis when playing a 32x game.

everything. in most games, the genny supplies half the sound and graphics. i.e. in MK2, the genesis does the sprites, and the 32X does the backgrounds.

		jaystar		May 18, 2002
			thats increadable use of parrell processing power. I had no idea that the 32x and megadrive were so reliant on each other this explanes why 32x doesnt work with nomad. next question the pass threw cable from genny to the 32x is 1:1 as you said , but that doesnt seem to be correct the 32x cant be overlaying its video ontop of rgb and and comp video. what type of video and audio info does the 32x really need from the genny at the very least

		Arakon		May 18, 2002
			the cable I built was 1:1 and worked fine. I'm pretty sure it actually uses RGB for the overlay. it needs a seperate sync pin that is usually unused (in normal RGB/AV cables), tho.

		ExCyber		May 18, 2002
			I have reason to believe that the 32X does not actually pass all of the cart pins straight through to the Genesis, but has some kind of addressing hardware decoding the upper bits of the cart address space. The only evidence I really have for this is that if I unplug the power from my 32X and try to run a later game that has an internal checksum, the checksum will always fail. However, this isn't just some kind of odd occasional error that just happens to consistently occur within the time it takes to do the checksum, because I've played Revenge of Shinobi for a while on this setup and it's not crashed or shown any obvious graphical corruption.

		jaystar		May 18, 2002
			from testing I can also backup your clam and the fact that megadrive cart slot could power parts of the 32x make me more intrested in how it works with a normal megadrive game by the way I did the s-video mod on my genny with a sony cxa1145p it worked great, (by the way a broken 32x got all the parts nessary to do the mod , its got a 220 cap and a 100 cap on the top board , and a series of resisters that total 76 ohm near the cart connector)use what you got I think the rbg decoder in the 32x is a sega chip , if its got one at all the rgb over lay may be the job of a sh-2. the 32x holds many secrets that have yet to be unlocked by the way I was reading your posts about your homeade backup devices , impressive work , i have started to build the multi-councle copyer the one for genny and snes , but i was wondering if I could see the plans for yours , you also stated it played 32x roms , that seems to make sence as long as the card has enought space.

Arakon

May 19, 2002

	
	
		
		
			by the way I was reading your posts about your homeade backup devices , impressive work , i have started to build the multi-councle copyer the one for genny and snes , but i was wondering if I could see the plans for yours , you also stated it played 32x roms , that seems to make sence as long as the card has enought space.

do you mean the eprom carts? cause those are the only backup devices I made. there are no plans for them.. I killed a bootleg cart (they use standard eproms instead of maskroms with different pinout), added sockets, rewired the additional pins for up to 32 MBit. Ex-Cyber helped me bigtime with tracing the right pins.

		Digdug2600		May 26, 2002
			A little off topic, but interesting. A guy from the game company N space came to our university and was lecturing. He said that the saturn is basically 2 32x's slapped togethor in paralell processing mode. He said Sega was worried about Nintendo and Sony releasing thier console, so they wanted to beat them so they just used thier existing hardware to develop the saturn and relase it quickly. He said if there wasnt such a rush the saturn would have been a completely different design (internally) and would have been more powerful, instead of only really a 1/2 generation advancement from the 32x.

ExCyber

May 26, 2002

	
	
		
		
			A guy from the game company N space came to our university and was lecturing. He said that the saturn is basically 2 32x's slapped togethor in paralell processing mode. He said Sega was worried about Nintendo and Sony releasing thier console, so they wanted to beat them so they just used thier existing hardware to develop the saturn and relase it quickly. He said if there wasnt such a rush the saturn would have been a completely different design (internally) and would have been more powerful, instead of only really a 1/2 generation advancement from the 32x.

Saturn and 32X have certain things in common, but to say that Saturn is "2 32x's slapped together in parallel" is pretty ridiculous. It's akin to saying that Neo Geo is "2 Genesises slapped together", or that Amiga is "2 Macintoshes slapped together" - it might roughly describe the architectural similarities and performance differences, but it's not accurate in any technical sense. I'm not an expert on the 32X architecture (I'd estimate that there are fewer than 20 of those worldwide), but as far as I know it's pretty severely lacking compared to Saturn.

		Nimoy		May 26, 2002
			While the 32X and Saturn both share dual Hitachi SH2 chips as their main processors, the ones in the 32X run at a lower clock speed and the Saturn also has it's two specialized VDP chips that the 32X does not (among many other differences). As such the two actually perform quite differently regardless of the fact that the main CPUs are the same. So no, the Saturn is not two 32X's slapped together at all. It would be pretty ignorant to think so. As ExCyber said, it is like comparing apples to oranges.

		M3d10n		May 28, 2002
			I still remember the original Saturn plans. It was pretty darn different that the real thing. In the very last, it was supposed to support true alpha blending, one of the key features that scared developers away. But the VDP1+VDP2 scheme does look like the Genny+32X sprite/background overlaying.

		racketboy		Jun 7, 2002
			The 32X and the Saturn were 2 completely different development projects at Sega. They were actually trying different 32-Bit possibilities out. To get some good info that is more in depth, check out http://www.atani-software.net/segabase/SegaBase-32...