G'Day is this the Comm card that ARP4-1 cart uses? If so will the normal parallel cable do to connect two? cheers
I'm not CERTAIN, but I thought the comms card was only used with connecting Playstation game hunter/Action Replay/Xploder carts to one's PC, but I could be wrong, so don't attempt to connect them and end up frying your 4-in-1.
. So what's the difference between PC Comm card ActionReplayPro 4-1 cart and the above one? believe there was a thread some time ago but no picture was posted so can't be sure whether both SS and PS ARP used same PC Comm card or not. cheers
Your'e wanting to connect to your Saturn, yeah? There's a thread at (gulp) Gamefaqs addressing this. You might want to sneak a peak there.
. since gamefaq doesn't have search for forum it will take time to fin dthe thread since it's 6 pages long... cheers
Yeah, I read that topic on Gamefaqs myself...which makes me pretty sure that thats the card you want to use with the AR... Edit: And yes, Gamefaqs is a wasteland filled with unimaginably stupid people.
Finally. Someone has the same views towards gamefaqs.com as I do. I'm not a lone. Is there a PCI version of the comms card since my motherboard doesn't have the old EISA slot. Although I do have an old PC with a few slots, however, I dont have the spare parts to get it working again.
Comms goodies The Comms-Link for the original PS and Saturn PAR4+ only comes in ISA flavor... =( On the advice of someone from SX (I think it was at SX), I built a dev computer around BioStar's M7MIA board. My dev compy is as follows: BioStar M7MIA (Rev. B w/ RAID) AMD Athlon 1.33GHz w/ 266FSB (doesn't support XPs :smt011 ) 512MB Samsung PC2100 (M7MIA is the only board I know w/ ISA and DDR) 20GB Western Digital HDD ATI Radeon 9000 (just a spare I came across) Sony DVD-ROM/CD-RW (I like Sony drives cause they're shorter than most, and I did the combo cause GiriGiri has issues with boxes with more than one optical drive) And of course my Comms-Link (mine came with a Parallel cable come to think of it) All housed in a cheap case I got from newegg.com Not too bad since so much of it was just spare parts (just had to buy the board, CPU, memory and optical drive [most people can find a spare though]). ~Krelian
I bought a Chinese clone of the comm-card and it worked perfectly with both PS (via an EMS cheat cart thingie) and SS (thru the 4-in-1). I dont think there's any difference. A PCI version doesnt exist AFAIK, just build a 2nd PC with an ISA mainboard :drinkers:
Yes, the PS and Saturn use the same card (useless fact of the day: the Saturn Action Replay was made first, which is probably why the protocol is big-endian like the Saturn instead of little-endian like the Playstation). Those that don't have an ISA slot can always build one of the parallel-port adapters. Also, IIRC some N64 device was Commlink-compatible and came with a prebuilt parport cable. Finally a word of advice: get a good quality cable, and get the shortest one you can find. The Commlink can do pretty high transfer rates and with a poor quality cable you're much more likely to experience transfer errors.
Yes, there was an adapter that came with the CD64 that does the same as the comm card. However, to anyone that plans to build a parallel-port circuit, please note that the program you intend to use has to be compatible with it(maybe someone would care to hack a driver/TSR that traps the I/O writes and sends them thru the LPT? :drinkers: ). AFAIK, the Caetla package for PSX has support for this adapter (called "Freewing"), but there are no Saturn tools in existence that work with this. If anyone wants the plans, I still have them somewhere on my HD.
Implementing support for the parport adapters is trivial and there is in fact a new-ish interface design that comes complete with a virtualization driver (don't have the link handy, can dig it up later if you're interested). All in all I know of three adapters - FreeWing, ExStand and the one from the previous paragraph. A year or so ago I disassembled the Caetla tools that supported both FreeWing and ExStand and the only differences between the two was how they mapped the status lines.
But wait a minute. Isn't this just a parallel port?? Like a printer port. Well I know that using the one thats included with the mobo isn't recommended but I found a PCI Parallel port that I can use. I just hope that I can use it for my gameshark, etc.
It's a parallel port, but not one that's compatible with the one in your computer. Which is why you need an interface. The interface and driver I was talking about earlier are located at PSX Alternative.
