AES quiz: Name this cart

Here's a hint:


Interesting, huh? :icon_bigg

 

I dunno. Is it Riding Hero or League Bowling? I'm assuming this is a cart with the link-up feature.

 

Nope, and nope. :icon_bigg

 

A blank unwritten cart? Full of eeproms and nothing else?

 

Getting warmer, there is no game on the cart.

 

Pranslation converter?

 

You win a coke. :thumbsup:

 

OOoh interesting. What's the compatibility like on the cart you have?

 

The Pranslation will play all games that don't surpass 400Megs. You can mod the Pranslation by soldering several wires on the Pranslation to play games with a higher meg count, but I believe it still won't play any of the newer games that are encrypted.

I think of the Pranslation as more of a collectible, and I don't really want to break the warranty seals on the cart to do the mod.

 

More info:

It's the first and most pure/basic converter, just passes through all the basic signals shared by both MVS and home carts and contains a discrete character multiplexer chip stolen from early home carts.

Later protected MVS games are incompatible with the old character multiplexer signals in the Pranslation so the Phantom and I believe the !Arcade! stole home versions of the protection/character chip just to pass through some new signals.

The last MVS games (after Sengoku 3 I think) don't work on any of the prior converters because I think they try to detect if they're running on a AES! The Super MVS Converter (which doesn't sacrifice any carts) seems to get around it by detecting a specific memory area and blocking communication with the cartridge.

 

These things look wild in a console, IMO.

 

Awesome.

Doesn't it put any strain on the PCB?

 

The cartridge slot on the Pranslation is extremely tight, It takes about 30 seconds to get the MVS cart on all the way. Once the cart's connected, they feel like one entity.

 

Never seen one of those before, ta for the picture.

 

Yeah, in the initial pictures I was thinking "... wtf?"
then after the secret was revealed... I couldn't understand how it would work, as I could clearly see the top of the cart. I don't know why I didn't think horizontal!

 

That will be the watchdog protection check. MAME used to do something similar, now it emulates the watchdog.

The game sits waiting for the watchdog to reset the game, if it doesn't fire then it knows it's on a console. It stores something in the nvram so it knows it's done it the check & whether it was an arcade or home neogeo.

 

Are you sure? AES have the watchdog too. I looked at the SMVSCII again and the address decoder which enables/disables the data bus only uses standard read/write strobes and a single other mystery AES signal.