Greetings from Brazil Has anyone tried to interface the serial port of a saturn to a PC? If I can connect two saturns using a link cable, why can't I connect it to a pc and create a "tunnel" where the comm port of the pc is directly connected thru the net to another pc's comm port? I don't know how much time I have between data frames before the saturn says the link is dead, but I do believe it will be a fun application. I'll give a try Anyone wanting to help on the pc software side?
What do you need from the pc software exactly? If it's only a RS232-to-TCP/IP-and-backwards bridge, i might try to help, though i'm kind of limited in free time. If it's more, please explain.
Ah, i got it. The point here is to allow the exising games, that already do work in a twin saturn setup via uart, to connect thru internet. The latency problem will be the most difficult here i suppose. Uart, though being slow, will have a tx-to-rx latency within 100-200 us, and the network latency between a few levels of switching is measured in msecs. Maybe it's not an issue, since there are some additional delays in games, CPUs must process the data before replying after all. But maybe it is. You never know until you try.
You got it, Hitomi2500. A very simple saturn-to-pc interface can be implemented so you can use the pc/net as a bridge. I'll take a look how the serial interface works and get back to you
Antime made a Saturn Serial Port - PC interface a long time ago. You can check his project page here : http://koti.kapsi.fi/~antime/sega/usb.html Basically, Saturn serial port is a serial controller connected to a custom connector, so it's relatively easy to exchange data via this port. The only problem is as serial port female connector is a Sega custom one, it can't be found anywhere, so the simplest solution to connect something to this port is to solder wires directly on Saturn motherboard ...
Plenty of people have interfaced with the com port. Forwarding it over the internet will probably have have problems but you never know until you try. Easiest thing to do is hook up two saturns and put a delay between them to test it. Probably best to do this with a PC as it's easier to tweak and see what's going on. The software would only be a few lines of code. If results are encouraging you can move on to the internet and match making functions.
In my last post, in order to simulate internet tunnel I was thinking of a FPGA delaying COM signals, as I do it a lot at work (image processing), but your idea is better Just put a PC with 2 COM ports between 2 Saturns, and you're ready to know if Saturns are OK to support few tens of msec of latency.
Yep Cafealpha2, that is what I'm thinking. I BELIEVE some msecs of delay can be supported since I BELIEVE saturn has to deal with noise in communication between the two consoles. I only have one link cable, but I'll think about severing it and adding something like a DB9 in middle of it, to scoop on the signals and play with that.
