help with dumping FE carts for clone project

[drzaiusx11]

If you want to take your costs down even more an arduino UNO retails for $25 while the mega is $45 (USD.) I assume you're making a PCB shield as well, so the added costs of 2 shift registers would be under a $1 (they go for around $0.30 to $0.50 each), so that could shave off about $20 off your current design.

 

I can share my sketch that handles treating the shift registers as extra IO pins too

[DrWho198]

The price is lower if you do not use an official Arduino Mega.

If you are going for cost effectiveness then an official Arduino would not be the way to go.

On the other hand, if you wish to donate money to the Arduino team then you could do that.

But that has little to do with trying to keep things as cheap as possible.

 

My Chinese Arduino Mega clone with USB cable costs me:

€6.28 (Including shipping)

 

a shield (optional but handy):

€3.17 (Including shipping)

 

5 Slots:

€2.06 (+ €5.61 shipping to Belgium)

 

TOTAL:

€17.12 (+/- 18.18USD)

 

 

Wires and a small piece of proto board that I used to raise the slot a bit are not included.

If you would avoid the protoshield and use a cartridge socket/port that you might have from a broken Atari then you will save even more money.

Thanks to using an Arduino Mega I have a lot of pins available for other stuff.

Edited December 2, 2015 by DrWho198

[drzaiusx11]

Yeah, the official ardiuno products are pretty pricey, but I don't mind supporting the team behind them so I usually end up just paying the "arduino tax" for my stuff. Pretty cool you can get a mega for that cheap nowadays--googling around shows you can get a knockoff of pretty much any arduino product for under $10 USD which is pretty sweet. Its amazing what you can get for your money on bangood and aliexpress these days. I guess its a great time to be a hardware enthusiast.

 

Price wise I'm investigating the new $5 pi for my project. I've tested it on the A+ and B+ so far, but there's no reason it shouldn't work on the new board too since it has the same pinouts and ARM chip. The damn things are pretty much sold out everywhere though, so it may take a while to get my hands on some. The A+ isn't a bad deal at $19 though.

 

At some point I may put up my arduino shield schematics in case someone with an UNO wants to give it a go--do you plan to publish your sketch as open source? With a bit of fiddling I bet I could get your code working on my UNO (I don't own a Mega atm)

[DrWho198]

When I get to the point that it is usable for most Cartridges then I'll probably release the code.

Might be a good idea anyway, since I just started using Arduino and never used C before. So I expect that others could improve my code. Although, it works fine as it is.

​The hardware/shield at this stage is Blinky's design. But I made my own sketch for it.

One thing you'll notice is that my delay to get a stable line is very short. I adopted that from Blinky's sketch, it worked fine so I didn't raise the delay time.

[+Gemintronic]

Hi. I think a Raspberry Pi cart dumper would be very useful since there is few products out there that can dump 2600 games. I own a Retrode but the 2600 adapter was never released and forum members who built one claim it didn't work.

 

I bought a 2600 adapter for my Retrode but it didn't work so well. I think the problem is two-fold: finicky contacts and support for various cart types. The maker of the Retrode was very helpful and very friendly, though.

[drzaiusx11]

Who's Blinky and what's his design? I assume without any external chips you can just wire the io pins directly to a card edge connector.

 

As for line delay, I arbitrarily chose the recommended time delay from an old EEPROM datasheet I found from the early 80s--I may be able to get away with a similarly short time, but most ROMs dump in under a second with my current value so I didn't feel like risking anything shorter for now. The arduino and wiringPI APIs may add some overhead when setting the IO pins that may make adding delays superfluous, but without a decent scope I can't easily check.

[DrWho198]

 

I bought a 2600 adapter for my Retrode but it didn't work so well. I think the problem is two-fold: finicky contacts and support for various cart types. The maker of the Retrode was very helpful and very friendly, though.

 

That's what we are doing, supporting almost all games.

I'm confident that we can write code to support almost 100% of the commercial games.

Homebrew boards are another matter since it is impossible to know about all of them and some use tricks that prevent us from accessing every bit of the rom chip.

Right now I have the hardware and software to run cartridges with:

2K, 4K, E0, E7, F4, F6, F8, FE, FA, MDMC and CV

 

Expect this list to grow soon.

MDMC cartridges with over 128 banks will be a problem because of the bank locking.

 

 

Who's Blinky and what's his design? I assume without any external chips you can just wire the io pins directly to a card edge connector.

 

As for line delay, I arbitrarily chose the recommended time delay from an old EEPROM datasheet I found from the early 80s--I may be able to get away with a similarly short time, but most ROMs dump in under a second with my current value so I didn't feel like risking anything shorter for now. The arduino and wiringPI APIs may add some overhead when setting the IO pins that may make adding delays superfluous, but without a decent scope I can't easily check.

This is where it all started:

http://atariage.com/forums/topic/56073-cheap-2k4k-x-in-1-menu-driven-multicart-for-atari-2600/

 

A design for a cartridge that supports up to 256 banks with cheap stock parts.

Then when I made the first cartridge I gave Blinky a PCB aswell. He then decided that he wanted to make it a flash cart. But he needed a programmer(he calls it a linker) for the cartridge.

I was planning of making a dumper, and felt that his linker might be a good starting point. When he gave me the sketch (at that point I never layed an eye on Arduino) I felt that his sketch was too far off of what I wanted to do. He focussed on the writing of his cartridge and I wanted to focus on reading existing cartridges. At some time I might add the writing of his flash card, but right now that is not my goal.

 

My goals are at the moment:

- Support most if not all available games

- Add a Joystick port that will also read out a paddle ( I want to use vJoy to connect to the PC because I think changing the Arduino to a HID would break the serial connection )

- Finish my Client that will allow you to run any game plugged into the dumper. Using Stella as emulator and allowing the use of the original Atari controller that is plugged into the dumper.

- if this works, add support for Blinky's flash cartridge.

 

but I think my project might need a new thread soon. I'm waiting for a good point to release the code and project.

Edited December 2, 2015 by DrWho198

[Andromeda Stardust]

 

I bought a 2600 adapter for my Retrode but it didn't work so well. I think the problem is two-fold: finicky contacts and support for various cart types. The maker of the Retrode was very helpful and very friendly, though.

I inquired about that in the forum a while back and someone else said they didn't work good so I forgot about it. For homebrews that use DPC+, is it possible for the Atari2600 to read the ARM code through bankswitching? If not, say for instance the ARM is translating or generating the actual code the 6507 reads in realtime, then dumping certain games through the cartridge port without reading directly from the actual flash chips that contain the ARM data would likely be impossible.

[DrWho198]

I have no dpc+ carts, but I have exactly the same concerns. Unless the carts act exacly like a traditional cartridge without any dynamic code, chances are small we could read out the actual static code. Although I expect there being a way to dump them, but I do not think AAge wants this information public.

Edited December 3, 2015 by DrWho198

[drzaiusx11]

Finally got around to making a VCS library that works on both Raspberry PI and Arduino:

 

https://github.com/drzaiusx11/WiringVCS

 

Currently works on 2K, 4K, E0, E7, F4, F6, F8, FA and FE carts.

 

It should be fairly easy to make a ROM dumper from anything arduino or rpi-compatible :-)

Edited February 8, 2016 by drzaiusx11

[Andromeda Stardust]

Finally got around to making a VCS library that works on both Raspberry PI and Arduino:

 

https://github.com/drzaiusx11/WiringVCS

 

Currently works on 2K, 4K, E0, E7, F4, F6, F8, FA and FE carts.

 

It should be fairly easy to make a ROM dumper from anything arduino or rpi-compatible :-)

Nice. Do you think you could make a "kit" that plugs into a Raspberry Pi card? This is really awesome, thanks for the info!

[drzaiusx11]

I just ordered a bunch of card connectors for making kits, so yes! The estimated shipping dates are early next month though... (yay china)