wow, it’s playing “directly” from cart! Really nice. Kicks ass!

@foley: Please name
(1) ONE eSATA capable microcontroller that is within reach for hobbyist developers and
(2) ONE smartphone or portable open handheld with eSATA interface

There you go. (1) Impossible and (2) useless :-)

all-in-one system? that would have about … atari, nes, snes, master system (card and cart), genesis, n64… we’re looking at about 7 or more cart slots. That’s ambitious! and I want one if it gets pulled off.

Favorite part of the video:
“Awww…crud.”
:)

First off awesome…
Secondly awesome…

Third i pondered doing this back in my days of high school, the idea was to fill a bunch of 5.25 drive slots in a computer with different game consoles and play directly off the original carts. I am glad someone has more initiative than me.

Forth a great addition but seems like it would be much more work. Make it so you can write the save file directly to it. This would probably need a custom emu or special decode on your usb board because i don’t think emus save the same format as the games itself.

Fifth… Don’t stop.

Tordre said the type of application I was thinking of.

Love the genesis, hope that works :)

Very nice hack, I really like to see this cross-platform interface. It would be interesting to have a modular socket for the carts and maybe a modular socket for controllers. This could be a method to allow gamers to play nostalgia games on their PC!

@nubie

I don’t see any room for lawsuits, as long as he doesn’t release any copy written code.

Aww yea getting my roms from Russian porn sites ;)

Nice work!
I love projects like this, i’ve never started with just an idea though.
Truthfully It’s a just for fun project right? So anyone saying it isnt useful or that it’s too hard are looking at it the wrong way or are not the people this is targeted at.

I havnt looked at the datasheets, but I’ve got heaps of Atmel ATMEGA8-16′s which were cheap on ebay.. do these have the capabilities required for this project?

would it be possible some time down the track to copy save data to and from the cartridge? I own all the original consoles for my games and I really dont enjoy playing games emulated, but I sure would love to back up my saves.. I’m a collector and I have enough games that it often takes me years to get back into a game I’ve started. more than once I’ve gone back to find the battery in the cart had died and lost my save.

Very nice hack.I can see this as a nice way to get rom images from your own carts instead of ripping off a unreliable site.
Which means if you own the cart no real legal issues … {not many to begin with}
Support for Sega sounds great ;because there are a ton of super cool Sega games out there.
Having more than one cart slot will pose an issue with the current controller being used etc …
Perhaps others have tried this before and would like to share some tips or a bit of their source code that they wrote from scratch ;)

Seriously: During the early debugging phase, I compared “my” SMW image on a binary level to various ROMs of what I thought should be the same game. Turns out that many of the roms that can be obtained through said channels are in fact far from original rips. You find all kinds of glitches and watermarks, but also signatures of other tools:
———–
Lunar Magic Version 1.51 ©2002 FuSoYa, Defender of Relm http://fusoya.cjb.net fusoya@moon.co.jp I am Naaall, and I love fiiiish!
———–

@matthias_h – Nice work, and clever fake-out of the FAT tables. Another way to get them would be to copy the tables from an SD card using a hex editor (my lazy method).

Converting the game title and using it for the file name is super sweet. I’d probably just expose a single file called ‘game.rom’. It’s easier, and Microsoft claims active patents on the use of long file names in the FAT file system (one reason why digital cameras stick with 8.3 naming format).

@Matthias_H

Right on man, I meant no disrespect. Great job. I was just thinking of a device that you could plug into your comp and have just sit there. Then you could have one possibly with multiple cartridge ports and a built in emulator, kind of like an all in one classic game station. I think I was dreaming outside of the original design ideals. LOL I just got carried away.

@ian: Using the same filename for all games will get you in trouble with the savegame handling, since most emulators relate their nomenclature to the ROM name. Since Microsoft has filed a patent infringement lawsuit related to FAT exactly once (TomTom), I don’t think I am in big danger here… Otherwise, I’m simply going to switch to unique 8-char hashes, retaining the possibility for savegame identification.

@foley: No offense taken and none intended from my side. My only PC happens to be this laptop (with an OpenPandora to come soon, hopefully), so this is what I am developing for.

@michaelb: Just add zeros until you have a total of 512 bytes :-)

Heya Matthias! Glad to see you’re still plugging along! Great hardware hacking here. You just keep getting better and better!

This is freaking amazing. IF you ever are to produce another, and have a reasonable price please inform me!

Does this have write capabilities? It would be awesome if I could take a spare cartridge and put whatever I want on it.

@jiremi: no, it doesn’t, and since I am not a homebrew person, this is not on my list even in the long term. In the limited time I have, there are only so many things I can focus on, and I hope nobody will mind if I pick the ones that matter the most to myself.

Which are, as of now:
- reading game carts correctly
- getting more games to work
- adding genesis/megadrive support
- custom PCB and a nice case
- possibly organizing a group order for kits

The following, among many others, are definitely not on my list:
- fighting with bitchy games that I don’t care about and not even the SWC can do
- write support of any kind (flash ROM, savestates)

Which doesn’t mean these things will never happen. I mean, I will hardly file a patent for connecting 20-year old technology with a bunch of wires, and once the idea is out there, someone might still sit down and do it.

@gerrit: Not these two particular ones. The S-dd1 is a cryptic data compression/decompression chip, so whichever part of the ROM is hidden behind that chip remains mingled or incomplete. Super FX and others should be fine, though.

We actually need the reverse of this.. a modern day MultiGameDoctor would be awesome and easily done if you’ve got FPGA skills. But not one has yet :(.

Awesome little invention, Matthias! I came from Kotaku. This device would be awesome with a little pine box case! Does this device heat up at all? Perhaps cooling would help with the slow downs if you have a high-speed USB, etc. I don’t know much about electronics.

Hope everything works out with this. I would love to be able to pick one of these up. Keep up the good work!

@alo: Please familiarize yourself with the difference between reading data from vs. writing data to a device…. you can’t write to read-only devices, period.

again: this is a device for l e g a l l y taking games that are stored on a read-only cartridge, and playing them on your computer. a device that stores your illegal (however modified you or others may have them) roms to a writable cartridge for playing them on the console, while technically possible, is exactly the opposite of what I did / will ever do.

So to all of you who are intellegent, forgive me I don’t know a lot about this stuff, and forgive me further if someone already sugested this, but could a posible solution be firewire 800 I know it is suposed to be faster than usb 2?

@meow: development kit for the ez-usb: us$500.

@tim: usb 2 is by far fast enough, but the chip i’m using cannot do the “high-speed” mode. also, coming up with an idea for an interface is not enough. you need to find a suitable controller chip, someone who will sell you a small number of them ($10,000), etc.

@matthias_h: Try Acquired Devices SerMod-100 or similar instead of the official devkit.

Also when you hit the limit of the Keil crippleware, try free SDCC instead.

This is a very cool little device

doesn’t the scsi command set specify an “ejected” signal or something – whatever usb cd drives or memory card readers do? at worst, you could just cycle the usb connection.

I’m going to echo the sentiments of above posters that save games would be awesome. couldn’t you make a r/w file next to the rom file that just maps to the sram on the cart? I know zsnes writes its save files next to the rom image, and other emulators can be modified to do this as well.

matthias: If you need a hand designing a circuit board etc let me know.

Think of a cool name, and win a prototype! :-)
http://www.snega2usb.com/wordpress/2009/07/contest/

so far, have you been able to incorporate reading the save file as well (srm, etc…), within the cartridge, are you intending to, or is that not a concern for you?

Interesting… Personally I’d pay up to $100 for something like this, ’specially an all-in-one solution that covers a few of teh classic consoles (at ‘least SNES/Genesis/N64)… Considering the number of old carts I’d have, it’d be well worth it. I’d probably spend more time scouring for all the ROMs to my old games than it’d be worth it.

Update:

@stevenmcfly, I am not speaking on behalf of the creator, but i would assume he was say for the fun of it, for shits and giggles, and in this case to learn of the USB mass device driver, and the FAT file system.

If we all did what was easy we would not get any progression of technology.

THIS IS AWESOME!!!! I have all of my game cartridges and my SNES, but instead of going (all the way) downstairs to play them, this would let me play them all right on my pc!! I wonder if there is something like this that I can use for my old NES games…. My NES stopped working, so I gutted it… Nice, cheap mcu, ppu, and sram.

I have learned a lot reading your site. Thanks for posting.

my own* rom images