Anyone have an idea on where to get a Saturn (compatible) cart connector (other than pulling one off a broken Saturn)?
He might be after a third-party replacement for an official one (and who could blame him). I don't know of any though.
Actually, my Saturn is fine. I want a couple connectors because I wanted to experiment with making an adapter for the ARP to the MegaDrive. A cheap adapter + ARP 4-in-1 cart would be a nice thing for homebrew. The main issue right now is finding the connectors.
oh now it make much more since, because its not often that the saturn cart connector breaks , though it does.
Funny, you hear a LOT about how third party carts for the Saturn "ruin" the connector. Given that, you'd think they'd be easier to find.
The point is a cheap 4MB ram cart you could use with the MD/CD/32X. A DRAM refresh circuit isn't much. Yes, it's more than just a PCB and a connector, but it's easier than doing the entire dram card... maybe. That's why I want the connectors... to make one and see just how practical it actually is. What I may do in the meantime is get another cheap ARP cart and solder across from the PCB to the ARP PCB edge.
RAM cart as in space for saving games or RAM cart as in random access memory cart? Because the former has been long done for MCD purposes. The schematic is floating around (probably on my harddrive too) and has been for a while. If you're crafty enough it is trivial to swap in a larger EPROM than the official cart came with.
Ram as in RAM, not save memory. Part of the reason we didn't see a bunch of ports for the CD or 32X was lack of RAM. The 32X in particular can easily handle most VGA games... if it had the RAM. SEGA really should have made a 4MB ram cart for the CD/32X. Yes, there are plenty of options for save memory for the SCD. I use my Neo Myth for extra save memory on my CDX. The Neo Myth CAN be used as a ram card for MD/CD/32X homebrew, but it wasn't really made for that and is too expensive for many people. A simple CHEAP ram card would probably be much more popular. Hence the idea for a cheap adapter for the cheap ARP carts.
Is the access rate through the cartridge slot fast enough for RAM though? I'd think the latency involved would negate the benefit of the extra RAM unless used for swap space or something.
Uh, ram being too fast is NEVER an issue (other than cost); too slow is. In any case, if timing is an issue, I can always generate my own /DTACK signal.
I meant with access through the cartridge slot. Obviously the slot and related buses have enough bandwidth to (mostly. Batman was it that had them?) negate any real loading times from mask rom. I admit I don't know how the hardware is setup inside offhand but I suppose if it has direct CPU access like I'm presuming that it would have more than enough bandwidth.
Wut? The MD like all <32-bit consoles runs code right off the ROM. At 7.68 MHz the MD's 68K doesn't even need wait states with multi-level decoding and slow ROMs.
