Saturn cartridge shells?

[ExCyber]

Anyone know of a source for Saturn-compatible cartridge shells, or how I might be able to get them made cheaply? The cost of injection mold tooling is way out of my price range. I thought it might be feasible to do it with some creative extrusion or thermoforming, but I don't have pricing info on that yet either, and there are definitely some engineering challenges involved with getting a good result from those methods. Casting resin might be an option, although that's awfully labor-intensive and the materials are somewhat costly...

Any ideas?

 

[Runik]

For what purpose do you want it ? Reusing existing cartridge couldn't do the trick ? Some used cartridge games are cheap, and sometimes broken cartridges popup on ebay at a good price ...

I don't have any idea besides that, and I don't know anything about recreating one from scratch :/

 

[ExCyber]

I'm trying to figure out how practical it would be to produce a small run of cartridges (like 50-100 pieces). I've found reasonable sources for the most important chips and PCBs in small quantities, but getting custom plastic parts made is something that's normally only done for much larger runs.

 

[ExCyber]

Even extrusion is too expensive for such a small quantity. It looks like my only options are:

1) Find a source of existing cart shells (I'm wondering if maybe EMS or Xinga have some that they would sell me, although the quantities are probably laughable even for that)

2) Casting resin.

3) Sell the things without a shell.

 

[racketboy]

Yeah Xinga usually makes their items in very large batches, so I'd say you should probably count them out.

Even if that wasn't the case, I couldn't image trying to describe what you wanted to them. They aren't the best with their English.

 

[ExCyber]

Originally posted by racketboy

Yeah Xinga usually makes their items in very large batches, so I'd say you should probably count them out.

The idea wasn't to have them do a run for me, but to see if they had any extras from prior runs.

 

[RockinB]

There was a time when gamechoiceclub.com sold Saturn ST Key cartridges for only 1.99$ (as many as you like), but now it's more expensive and shipping is very expensive, too.

What type of cartridge are you going to sell?

 

[ExCyber]

I don't have a specific design yet; didn't want to bother unless I thought it was going to be feasible to produce it. What I've priced so far is for a flash-only cartridge (i.e. no expansion RAM) with 4-8MBit of flash memory or so. I have some other ideas that I want to look at, though.

 

[racketboy]

Originally posted by ExCyber+Sun, 2006-06-25 @ 02:42 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ExCyber @ Sun, 2006-06-25 @ 02:42 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'><!--QuoteBegin-racketboy

Yeah Xinga usually makes their items in very large batches, so I'd say you should probably count them out.

The idea wasn't to have them do a run for me, but to see if they had any extras from prior runs.

[post=146773]Quoted post[/post]​

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Well, i guess it doesn't hurt to ask then