Yet another homebrew saturn card

Now i sound like some advertisement or something... Sorry. I live in Moscow, Russia, but since majority of the saturn units are technically in Japan and US, this rule still applies. What i wanted to emphasize is that there are some logistics difficulties between my home and average saturn user, thus i'm starting the assemblers list this early.

If you want to assemble it yourself, then just get the BOM and send it to your IC supplier, add the PCB cost, and voila, here's your price. For a single piece i think it will be around $60-$70, but it depends.

 

Ah, comrade.
Still have to go to Moscow, might pick it up in person.

 

I can send few carts to Darius-sensei near Paris if you need. From your place, I suppose it's nearer than Moscow

 

cafealpha2: Quite nearer, yes. ;-)

It's just, since Moscow is on my trip list, I used that as a semi-joke

 

x

 

Keep up the great work.... So this is your version of a action replay? Memory card and ram expansion. Could this also replace the CD drive?

 

Basically yes, a bit more versatile version of action replay, at least for a first release. As for CD replacement, modems and other stuff, that is technically possible, but is on a long-run roadmap. I wll change the schematic before the first release (actually i'm doing it now in a background) to include some features not mentioned in the first post, that might prove useful. But since the cost is already a bit high, i might actually skip some of'em, or make'em optional.
By the way, 10M04 chips are still not available (and lead time was extended), while production 10m08 (not engineering samples, but a real ones) appeared at mouser even cheaper than ES were, for $17.85 currently. So i think it will be ok to make a release with 10m08 onboard.

And as i promised, i've put up a preorder list here : www.wasca.info
It's completely designless, please bear with it. The more i spent on design and scripting, the less will remain for development.

 

This is a very interesting project. How feasible do you think it is to have the cart switch automatically depending on the game? Like it boots as a memory cart, and switch to a 1M/4M/ROM cartridge when a game needing it is detected?

 

It's possible, but hard. These carts have the same ID register at the same address, and games access this register to actually detect cart type, so there's no way to detect it on-the-fly (so much for all these "auto 1M/4M switchable" AR carts). I can possibly snoop CD accesses to detect game product code when BIOS loads IP.bin, and keep an on-cart database of the games that use RAM, but some of these probably support power memory (flash) as well, so it's up to user to decide after all. Still might be a nice idea at least for distinguishing between 1M and 4M RAM.

 

I would be happy with just a Switch and of course a list of games and what Ram works best for the game.

 

This can be done on Pseudo Saturn side, because CD-R loader module reads IP.bin before loading the game itself

 

I'm launching another PCB iteration, this should be less buggy, plus some features added, like I2S audio and bluetooth. New PCB souces and gerbers are on github, but bear in mind that it is still untested beta. Still, BOM is very close to final i suppose.
Preorder website is temporarily down due to personal reasons. I will fix it this weekend.

 

This is amazing work!

 

Great :]
You forgot to mention the addition of STM32 chip

Thank you for the holes under thermal quads

 

I am genuinely curious about the miracles you can do with the bluetooth addition!
I was also wondering, where you able to get any more information whether you will be able either to emulate, or simulate the VCD card via Wasca? It would be nice if you could do so at some point, for the shake of those game utilize it / require it.
Apart all the above, keep the outstanding work hitomi2500,Wasca is going to be a blast!

 

Nothing too miraculous, just the same data transfer and remote control as with USB. Actually, you gave me the idea, mentioning X-Terminator.

No, not wasca. To emulate VCD one at least need to use all the video pins from VDP2, and wasca's FPGA simply doesn't have enough pins. And replacing FPGA would increase price and assembling difficulty. But the SAROOO project probably have both the pins and computing power to do this (after PCB rerouting).

 

Speaking of Sarooo did you get the bugs fixed that causes freezes?

 

Not yet. I'm still working on the case, with some intermediate results, but no fix yet. I've been mostly away from saturn for quite a while, hopefully i will return to more real hardware debugging soon.

Upd: While the board is in the fab, i'm tinkering with SD cards. For now they work in an extremely unoptimal soft-spi single-byte non-dma polling mode, and the speed is terrible. I measured something like 18KiB/s today, loading 4MiB power memory image takes almost 4 minutes. If i won't be able to speedup altera's SPI core with soft measures, i will probably need a custom core to do the SD stuff.

 

I am interested in this, but don't understand the pre-orders.

 

wasca.info -> preorder -> enter personal info and choose assembler ?

please let us know if preorder doesn't work.

edit: everything is still early WIP, so you will have to wait until getting a working unit.