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Saturn cartridge shells?
ExCyber - Jun 21, 2006
  ExCyber Jun 21, 2006
Anyone know of a source for Saturn-compatible cartridge shells, or how I might be able to get them made cheaply? The cost of injection mold tooling is way out of my price range. I thought it might be feasible to do it with some creative extrusion or thermoforming, but I don't have pricing info on that yet either, and there are definitely some engineering challenges involved with getting a good result from those methods. Casting resin might be an option, although that's awfully labor-intensive and the materials are somewhat costly...

Any ideas?

 Runik Jun 22, 2006
For what purpose do you want it ? Reusing existing cartridge couldn't do the trick ? Some used cartridge games are cheap, and sometimes broken cartridges popup on ebay at a good price ...

I don't have any idea besides that, and I don't know anything about recreating one from scratch :/

 ExCyber Jun 22, 2006
I'm trying to figure out how practical it would be to produce a small run of cartridges (like 50-100 pieces). I've found reasonable sources for the most important chips and PCBs in small quantities, but getting custom plastic parts made is something that's normally only done for much larger runs.

 ExCyber Jun 22, 2006
Even extrusion is too expensive for such a small quantity. It looks like my only options are:

1) Find a source of existing cart shells (I'm wondering if maybe EMS or Xinga have some that they would sell me, although the quantities are probably laughable even for that)

2) Casting resin.

3) Sell the things without a shell.

 racketboy Jun 24, 2006
Yeah Xinga usually makes their items in very large batches, so I'd say you should probably count them out.

Even if that wasn't the case, I couldn't image trying to describe what you wanted to them. They aren't the best with their English.

 ExCyber Jun 24, 2006

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by racketboy



Yeah Xinga usually makes their items in very large batches, so I'd say you should probably count them out.

The idea wasn't to have them do a run for me, but to see if they had any extras from prior runs.

 RockinB Jun 26, 2006
There was a time when gamechoiceclub.com sold Saturn ST Key cartridges for only 1.99$ (as many as you like), but now it's more expensive and shipping is very expensive, too.

What type of cartridge are you going to sell?

 ExCyber Jun 26, 2006
I don't have a specific design yet; didn't want to bother unless I thought it was going to be feasible to produce it. What I've priced so far is for a flash-only cartridge (i.e. no expansion RAM) with 4-8MBit of flash memory or so. I have some other ideas that I want to look at, though.

 racketboy Jun 27, 2006

  
	
	

		
		

			Originally posted by ExCyber+Sun, 2006-06-25 @ 02:42 AM-->
QUOTE(ExCyber @ Sun, 2006-06-25 @ 02:42 AM)