Let me preface by saying the concept of this reader has been driving me bazonkers for last few days and I am a controls engineer for a liquid fertilizer plant in a small town and our budget is somewhat tight. So in the spirit of not spending any money I spend a lot of time deducing how certain pieces of equipment work and how to get them as cheap as possible. Once you peel back a veneer from a brand new Allen-Bradley PanelView +6 HMI you realize its just a self contained touchscreen PC running Windows CE with a FactoryTalk ME license on it. Suddenly what cost $4800 is now worth $1000 in parts and $1000 in software. So let's get back to the reader. I want one for my home Lindbergh setup and like a good little engineer I don't want to pay more than I have to. After some digging I found out the reader is made by SANWA NEWTEC and is a contactless Coil-on-Chip reader with a print head. http://www.sanwa-newtec.co.jp/english/products/me_cr_1p_m_e.html After thinking about it, I realized this makes sense. Why would SEGA re-invent the wheel with the cards? Why wouldn't they use a already established protocol and off the shelf hardware. This got me to thinking about alternatives. Coil-on-Chip is a standard and has a standard instruction set to ensure wide compatibility. So one should be able to take a generic reader/writer with the correct interface (RS-232 according to the ver. 4 manual and wiring diagram) and use it in place of it? http://biz.maxell.com/en/product_security/?pci=7&pn=sp0006 Sure it doesn't have the print option but in the grand scheme of things that doesn't really hurt me as I can just write on them with a magic marker. Big plus to this module is that it uses a micro-controller and I can change the instruction set at my leisure just in case SEGA did anything funny with the unit. The only reason I can think of that I would even need to mess with it would be the print data. But depending on how that was coded it may or may not need an ACK from the reader. If it doesn't I am good, if not I need to rewrite the code to return the correct response even though no printing took place. This also opens up an interesting thought. Will a generic Coil-on-Chip card function in an OEM R/W from the arcade cabinet which would let a guy get away from the expensive purpose made Initial D cards. Grand total investment to get a reader that works with the game would be 25 bones with the module and a few blank cards if I can make this work. So has anyone tried this or can offer up any help to set me in the right direction?
