Hail guys, not sure if this is the right forum for this but it's a Sega Saturn cartridge that I need some assistance with identifying so I figured this would be good. So, I got this cart a few years ago bundled in with a Saturn I bought from eBay and the cart has a black case with no label, nothing fancy so I figured I'd just take the thing apart just to figure out what it is and I'm at a bit of a brick wall. I attached a photo (sorry if the quality is not superb) of the front of the board since I figure that gives a better chance to actually figure it out. Now, I was certain that it was an Action Replay cart, one of those 4 in 1 region free, saves, extra RAM etc ones but I found out that apparently Action Replay carts will boot something different at the Sega Saturn screen. I realize that may not make any sense but the cart functions that when it is plugged in, no matter what, the Sega Saturn does not care about region (not sure about PAL as I don't have any retail PAL discs), and it functions as a rather large memory back up cartridge. I am not sure if it actually does the extra RAM functions since I don't own any titles that benefit/require the extra RAM. Hope this isn't blatantly obvious and I'll feel like a total idiot haha. Thanks guys.
I have one with the exact same board, including the pcb id on the left (DATEL REF 1175). It's a "Mega Memory Cartridge", and holds 81920 blocks of memory (I think the official carts have one tenth of that). It also runs its own pre-boot program (you see the cart boot to a Sega logo, then back to the bios, and THEN you have to select "start game"). My cart has a 4mbit flash (SST 28LF040), plus a 1mbit one (SST 29LE010). I'm leaning to think that it uses some kind of on-cart compression to achieve that block size, because official carts with ~8000 blocks also use 4mbit DRAMs, and that would explain the PAL16CE as well as how it boots to bios at first. Yours seems to have only two 1mb flash ICs though.
Thanks for the responses guys, ASSEMbler yeah I can move saves to and from it so it's definitely a memory cart, and Druid II, your explanation of the pre-boot sequence makes sense as to why it can load Japanese games when it's plugged in unless I plug it in after turning the console on. Thanks again for the responses, mystery solved. Although I realize that there is the issue of the security ring, but has there been any progress made in cart format as to bypassing that security check? I heard about the guys who made a homebrew game (Police Officer Smith) and have a cart that bypasses the security check so they can run their game on a unmodded console.
Saturn ROMs are 16bits so it need TWO of these 8-bit chips (preferably of the same size, mind you). And the very same chips that holds the boot program will also hold the user data. It's exactly the same hardware as the Action Replay, but without the comms port.
