Developing a Sega Game Gear flash cartridge
posted Dec 15th 2010 9:46am by Mike Szczysfiled under: handhelds hacks, Microcontrollers
[Gerry O'Brien] tackled his most recent project, designing a flash ROM cartridge for the Sega Game Gear, with great success. Above you can see the test rig he used to reverse engineer the communications between an original ROM chip and the circuit board that it came on. He removed the chip, soldered a ZIF socket to the pads, then used a DIP socket as an adapter for that chip. Connected to each pin is a test lead for a logic analyzer. That’s a heck of a lot of channels to decipher!
It turns out that the cartridges use Integrated Mapping (does anyone have a link explaining this?) so dropping in a flash memory chip is not an option; you need a memory bank controller. [Gerry's] solution to this issue is twofold: you can etch your own board with a controller chip and ZIF socket for the flash chip, or you can modify a Sega Master System cartridge to use as an adapter board. We’ve got pictures of both methods after the break, as well as his five instructional videos walking us through the fabrication process.
This isn’t [Gerry's] first time working with flash cartridges. We looked at his work with Game Boy ROMS earlier in the year.
Here’s an etched adapter board. The IDC plug is used for testing with an oscilloscope and logic analyzer.
Here’s a much more compact adapter made from a Sega Master System cartridge.
Check out [Gerry's] youtube channel where you’ll find his instructional videos.
Excellent work. :-)
More information about the two main mappers used on the Sega Master System (and by extension the Game Gear) can be found on the SMS Power! wiki: http://www.smspower.org/Development/Mappers