idea: Saturn cartridge to emulate real game carts

[RockinB]

Today I've read about backward compatibility and as we know, Saturn has none.

But we have a very nice SMS emulator made by VBT and some other emus, too.

1) What if we had a homebrew Saturn cartridge, which serves as a cartridge connector converter for several videogame systems, so that you can plug SMS, GBC, MD and SNES cartridges in?

2) If then this cart would have some additional MByte of RAM, then it would be perfect.

3) Or even better, some additional flashrom could hold the emulator binary.

--> something like a 4-in-1 cart, but with SMS, GBC, ..., cartridge slots.

What do you think?

 

[vbt]

It sound interresting but pretty hard to make such cards. It needs some electronics skills (that I don't have), for sure many people here have them (Pinchy, Ex-Cyber, Charles Mac Donald, etc).

 

[SaturnAR]

yeahp. i think it's possible. If there's enough info about the connectors and the communicartion, i think the electronic part would be easy.

 

[ExCyber]

This is an interesting idea. I've seen similar products for N64, PS1, and Gamecube. Really I think the hardest part would be coding a good emulator.

 

[RockinB]

Originally posted by ExCyber@Sun, 2006-07-16 @ 07:50 PM

This is an interesting idea. I've seen similar products for N64, PS1, and Gamecube. Really I think the hardest part would be coding a good emulator.

[post=147073]Quoted post[/post]​

VBT's SMS port is best suited for such an adapter. The fact that the ROM is already on the cart and only optionally placed in any on-Saturn RAM, means less memory constrains.

However, some additional RAM would be needed for SNES and Mega Drive emus, at least for development.

How far is the development of todays microcontrolers? Do they have decent clockspeeds, are they cheap enough and easy to attach? An additional SH microprocessor (SH4?) would be nice...

 

[SaturnAR]

Well, i've a few(lot) of years working with PICs microcontrollers. The last series of Microchip PIC Microcontrollers run up to 160Mhz(overclocked) or more.I'm talking about dsPic series.

If you need something about 40Mhz(10 million instructions per second) you could use 18F series or 16C series(this is an OTP(one time programmable) series, but cheapper that the "F"(flash memory) series)and intended for massive production.

Lower series run from 4Mhz to 20Mhz(12F and 16F series).

You have a lot of models to choose.

And for people who develop for Saturn, they can be programmed using C lenguage.

They're extremly easy to attach and with a lot of protocols and modules implemented.

Visit www.microchip.com for tech/prices info.

Regards.

 

[RockinB]

Thanks for the info, SaturnAR.

As for the purpose of a hardware extension cartridge, I'm interested which microcontroler/microprocessor might be best suited. Guess it makes only sense, if it has significantly more mips, that one SH2. So starting from at least 40 mips and having at least 16bit, better 32bit. Well, these might have a lot more pins than 8bit controlers, so they are more difficult to solder.

What do you think about the AVR32 AT32AP700?

I've seen someone been talking about "dual core Adi Blackfin 561 (two 500MHz DSP cores)" which sounds impressive. Also the Renesas SuperH processors are quite fast. There is a SH2A with 400 Mips! Still, beaten by the SH4 processors.

I love thinking about all types of Saturn hardware extension, hopefully it'll become reality some day.

 

[SaturnAR]

Hello.

Well, The Atmel AP7000 is really powerful.But we're talking about Atmel and that's an unknown zone to me(of course, i can learn).

If you want 32 bit MCUs, then forget about Microchip PICs. They are only up to 16 bits.

So, you want to add ROM and RAM memory too?How much?

Regards.