Just making sure about the 4 MEG Ram cart....
- Thread starter slinga
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Mostly Sega Saturn Technical Bulletin #47, which specifically describes the two cart sizes as 8 megabit and 32 megabit, plus the fact that a 4 megabit expansion would only represent a 25% increase in usable work RAM, not enough to handle games like MSH vs. SF that need to have fast access to 4 large animated characters at a time.
Package size is usually determined by the number of I/O pins needed, not the size of the chip itself. DRAMs typically have a multiplexed address bus so they only need about half as many address pins as the size would suggest.
Originally posted by dhau@Nov 28, 2003 @ 11:40 AM
Well, thanks for info! This is great that it's actually 4 megabytes (i.e. 32 MBits).
I bet it's possible to extend this even further (i.e. 16 MBytes), but no game will use the extra memory. However it could prove very usefull for homebrew stuff
Depends how much cartridge RAM the system is able to address. I doubt it'd go TOO high, but certainly more than 4MB. I'd doubt more than 16MB would be possible, though I could be wrong.
Added: For reference, the N64, a 64-bit system, released after Saturn, can address up to 64MB at a time on the cartridge bus.
I've never seen anyone attempt more than 64MB, at any rate... not even with flash ROM or anything like that. Maybe it can address 256MB, though, which makes me wonder why Tototek or some such group hasn't made a flash cart of some sort for it...
As an aside, btw, GBA can address a TON of data, currently the first matrix ROM's at 512MB would be compatible in GBA with the full space available.
That's probably because there's nothing to run on it. Nobody made a 32MB Genesis flash cart, even though the SSF2 mapper should be able to address that much.
Anyway, getting back to Saturn, it's worth noting that e.g. the AR 4M Plus (and probably other AR carts) crams everything except the ID register into the CS0 space, i.e. ROM, RAM, and commslink registers, and decodes a minimum of address bits, so hacking more RAM into an existing cart is a dicey proposition. With new hardware, though, the comms registers could probably be moved to CS1 without much trouble (and patching the firmware would be pretty easy).
I may have misjudged your statement; I had gotten the impression from other threads that you already knew enough about the hardware involved to know the answer to this question and were just trying to give me a hard time. Plus I was cranky at the time, which didn't help.
Maximum usable ROM size and maximum storage are not necessarily the same thing. GBA flash carts have lots of memory primarily to enable multiple games to be carried around on the cart, which is not expected to always be near mass storage. N64 copiers, on the other hand, were designed with the assumption that mass storage is readily available (and it was usually integrated into the unit itself), and thus have memories sized primarily for ROM emulation. Different functions -> different requirements -> different memory sizes. As for flash carts specifically, I only know of Nintendo's developer flash carts and Pudova Valery's homebrew flash cart (not his V64 Jr. clone, it's the other schematics that nothing on his site really talks about), both of which have a limited number of users.
antime
Extra Hard Mid Boss
GBA games have always been expected to grow to the maximum size, it's just been an issue of game makers providing the content and Nintendo providing the cartridges. The former isn't much of an issue anymore with the movie player technologies that have been announced, the latter however..
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