Would you rather have....

[Necromancer]

Here's a thought. You could go with a HuCard "carrier" design that costs a little more, and the games could be on SD cards or daughter boards/cards that simply attach to the HuCard carrier. The carrier is what slots into the unit and holds the mount for the data unit that contains the game code.

That's more or less ark's plan except with eeproms instead of flash cards: use a generic board w/ a eeprom socket, burn whatever you want to the eeprom, stick it in the socket and slap a corresponding label on the hump.

[Senshi]

I'd buy either but I prefer CD's.

[TheOldMan]

I've considered this before, and contacted my electronics engineer friend to see if she had any insight. Never heard back from her though.

Probably because sd cards and the like (micro-sd, etc) are serial in nature. The chip on a Hucard is a parallel setup.
So, you'd have to have RAM to hold the converted image, and a serial-parallel translation circuit....
Which would require some kind of clock for the conversion circuit....etc.

See why she never replied ?

BTW, that's also why you won't see a USB type card. Same problem.
Personally, I'm waiting for charlies ide circuit. I think it would be neat if we could hook it up on the expansion bus on the turbo, and use a 'new' system card to transfer images to ram on the card from a hard-drive. Or even a from a newer cd drive.

[nodtveidt]

Mac and I talked about such a thing a few years ago, but at the time, the MCU hadn't yet been decapped so there was still much work to be done. Things might have changed since then.

[BlueBMW]

Does someone have a schematic for a hucard using flashable rom chips (surface mount ideally but dip or socketed would work too)  I have an idea....

[TheOldMan]

From what I read on his 'blog', he has a working circuit for a Genesis cart that handles ide. He was using it to test FMV stuff.

Seems to me that would be very similar (well, not the drivers, but...) to what is needed for an external CD-ROM on the pce interface connector. We could move the SDRam to the HuCard, and (hopefully) read from the circuit into the on-card ram, much like a real system card does. Add in an eeprom and a decoder, and it -might- be possible to run a menu program from the eeprom to load rom images (<128k ?) from cd. Then we could disable the eeprom and re-set to run the image.

Just thinking out loud again.....

[Arkhan]

Does someone have a schematic for a hucard using flashable rom chips (surface mount ideally but dip or socketed would work too)  I have an idea....

uh.  didn't you see the HuCard CCAG video, lol.

[spenoza]

Here's a thought. You could go with a HuCard "carrier" design that costs a little more, and the games could be on SD cards or daughter boards/cards that simply attach to the HuCard carrier. The carrier is what slots into the unit and holds the mount for the data unit that contains the game code.

That's more or less ark's plan except with eeproms instead of flash cards: use a generic board w/ a eeprom socket, burn whatever you want to the eeprom, stick it in the socket and slap a corresponding label on the hump.

Or a snap-on plastic cover! Ooooooo.... Stylin'!

[nodtveidt]

OK... snooping around for usable chips, I came across this...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/360300274823

Looks like they have over 11 thousand of them and are selling them off in lots of 50. It comes out to about $5.52 apiece. The question is... is 100ns fast enough?

EDIT: I think they'll work just fine... the chip inside my GE game is a M27C4001-15F1, which is a 150ns chip... a 100ns chip should work wonderfully.

[nodtveidt]

It appears as if Atmel still manufactures chips that fit the bill...

http://www.atmel.com/dyn/products/product_card.asp?part_id=2453

EDIT: I found a supplier out of Guangdong, China that may be able to get these, and at a pretty damn good price too.

[TheOldMan]

It comes out to about $5.52 apiece.....
a 100ns chip should work wonderfully.

Yes, 100ns will work. Up  to about 120ns is fine, btw.
But now everyone has independant collaboration - the chips are about $5 each, making the total for parts
alone about $15.

[nodtveidt]

I've gotten a quote from JiaYe Technology (HK) Co., LTD for the Atmel AT27C080-90PC... they quoted me $4.50 apiece for an order of 5, or $3.50 apiece for an order of 1000. The TSOP package apparently isn't being made anymore so I asked for PLCC, which is arguably just as good but I guess there's going to be a little more cost for the mount.

[TheOldMan]

TSOP's would just make a flatter board (*I think*) and be easier to solder. PLCC works, but you either need a socket or a steady hand to solder them on.

[nodtveidt]

You can get the boards made with the socket pre-installed... it doesn't seem to cost much more and makes it way easier to put together working cards.

[spenoza]

Well, if you intend to make any slightly larger games, won't you need to include some kind of memory mapper? How complicated will something like that be?