Hi there, I received my new Retrode from Dragonbox the other day. I noticed my SNES cart slot is only the basic main socket, and is missing the 2 side sockets (not sure what they are called)?
The instruction manual shows the 2 side sockets, so I was wondering if they are shipping now only with the mains socket and why? I still managed to dump most of my saves, I am just curious. Thanks!
That was the case with the ones Matthias sold directly (or at least some of them, including mine). I'm not aware of any games that you need them for dumping.
Those side pins are not being used, so at some point we dropped them in an effort to save material and, therefore, the planet ;)
lol ok, thanks guys :)
As I understand it, in the wild, the outer segments of the SNES cartridge connector are used for communicating with coprocessors on the cartridge, which is unnecessary when dumping the ROM.
(Aside from the handful of games like Super Mario RPG and Kirby Super Star which interpose the SA-1 chip between you and the ROM, but you need an extended dumping adapter for those anyway because the Retrode's microcontroller is too busy to successfully fake a CIC sync so the SA-1 will let you in. If you build an extended dumping adapter, it will talk to the SA-1 on the Retrode's behalf using a couple of dedicated timer chips and a PIC programmed to act as a fake CIC host chip.)
...at least, that's what I remember being in the extended dumping adapter. I just beta-tested one I didn't build.