4 in 1 AR Saturn china clone

some time ago i purchased myself a cheap 4 in 1 cardridge for the Saturn.
i wasnt aware that there are clones of them around, cause you know...its all from china, lol.

the cardridge worked fine, savegame manager, action replay, cheat data base, dont know if ram cause i didnt have any games that needed it. but one day i fucked the cardridge up while wanting to update the cheatdata base on it. i was flashing a newer version of the cheatdata base, cause the 1.92 was outdated and it didnt have cheats to the games i had. it did flash just fine, no error. but when i started it up again, i got a pixelated screen. i thought ok, maybe a bad connection on the connector and cleaned it and tried again. well after the second flash the cardridge didnt want to boot up again and cant be recognized anymore via flasher discs.

since that i am trying to get information on the cardridge to fix it, but cant find anything.
its a white cardridge, with a label showing some fighters like Krilin from Dragonball and others.
On the inside theres a blue pcb labeled "GoldenFinger V2".
It has only 3 chips on it, a PAL GAL/GE, two 29F020 and one free space U1 where a chip can be added but dont know whats it for. I tried figuring out the schematic and how everything is connected and found out the two 29F020 share the same line, as if they are connected together to make it look like one storage space on the Saturn interface. and maybe the cardridge pinout is somehow wrong so that the lines for reprogramming arent all there.
I tried flashing the 29F020 chips on my pc with ar code and pseudo saturn, but the Saturn doesnt recognize it.
I think that the code was written some other way, maybe byteswapped or shared onto both chips at the same time and i cant programm 2 chips to share the same data on my programmer.

so, anyone a suggestion how to revive this cardridge?

 

Re-purchase an EMS Action Replay Plus 4in1 from play-asia.com would be the best solution.

 

i already got one thx, just wanted to repair this for fun.

 

They are probably 8bit chips used on a 16 bit bus. So you would need to interleave the rom and program over 2 chips

So say rom is 123456
EPROM one would would have 135
and EPROM two would be 246

In this case, address lines would be connected to each other and data lines wouldnt.

Otherwise, get another cart and dump its chips to compare and/or copy into the faulty one.

 

I've seen these on aliexpress. It says in the description that it doesn't support firmware update.
Also you can buy the ems ar either directly from ems or aliexpress. It's cheaper than playasia.

 

well obvisiously i dont want to spent money on another clone cardridge as i have an original EMS one too. wondering why the firmwares of the clones arent around the web, when the AR ones are...

thanks Bad_Ad48 for the explanation, but have i got a chance to flash those on the saturn or must i really flash them on pc?
doesnt the flasher disc for saturn do blind write without ID check?

 

Maybe you misunderstood me, I know that you have an EMS AR already and I didn't suggest to buy a clone AR. I simply shared my "findings" about how the original EMS AR is cheaper if you order it directly from EMS or Aliexpress instead of Playasia.

 

Id do it on the pc. Splitting the Rom, it's with hex workshop or winhex that lets you do it easily. Can't remember which one off top of my head though

 

thanks for the info !