PC Engine/Turbografx plug in?

[hernan43]

This looks excellent! Are you going to sell these or offer the schematics up for download at all? I'd be happy to help test in any way I can.

[skaman]

My revised prototype plugin PCB with support for Street Fighter II' arrived.  The PCB adds control of /WR to enable the SF2 mapper.  SF2 support requires using my PCE/TG16 firmware which will most likely be released as FW v0.26.

[Shwing]

Looks great! Can't wait to test one out.

[skaman]

Here are pics of the Plugin PCB in an aftermarket SNES shell:

[panopticblue]

Hello, I would love to test one of these. Is there any way to purchase? I can provide my own card slot.

[skaman]

@panopticblue - check your PMs.

[Dadicus-Primus]

Here are pics of the Plugin PCB in an aftermarket SNES shell:

Hello, long time retrode owner but new forum member here. Searched quite a bit to figure out how to back up hu cards and made my way to this thread. I was wondering if I could purchase one of the turbografx 16 plugins/adapters? I am very interested in backing up my very own hu card roms. Thanks!

[s]

Hello, can I purchase one of these plugin PCBs? I can also provide my own HuCard slot.

[skaman]

@s - check your PMs.

[s]

Here's what it looks like in a black SNES cart shell.

I also made labels for it (two were created using templates created by michaelmannucci on DeviantArt).

[skaman]

Nice!

[Retrofan]

I had a nice chat with skaman via PM and decided to go for ordering his PCB as well as the Tototek HuCard slot - trying to mate them at my own risk.





Skaman's PCB as it arrived.



The Tototek Hucard slot.


Top


Underside. The mounting pins are in a different alignment than the original HuCard slot. No suprise here, since the Tototek slot is meant for use with their own dumper PCB.



Side view at the mounting pins. These do not carry any electrical connection to the HuCard interface pins.



I had to drill skaman's PCB to clear the Tototek slot mounting pins. Then I scraped the solder mask from the surface surrounding the pin holes to uncover the copper underneath. I mounted the slot onto the PCB and distributed a generous amount of solder to the mounting pins. Since the copper forms a large heat sink connected to the ground pin, having a soldering station with high thermal capacity and an extra wide tip in the handpiece helps a lot. I went for a Weller WS-81 with a WSP 80 handpiece.




Then I soldered the rest of the interface pins and tested them against the PCB's pins usind a DMM. Some pins are assigned in a different way than found in AaronE's wiring schematic:
https://www.retrode.org/plug-in-adapters/   




Blazing Lazers HuCard test-fit






And there you have it, the HuCard plugin adaptor for the Retrode. Merrily dumping your HuCard ROMs to any device you'd like to by USB mass storage protocol. Make sure to put the whole adapter thing with the HuCard slot facing to the Retrode's backside in the SNES slot, and set the voltage switch to 5 V. Also, upgrade the Retrode's firmware to at least v0.26a - I didn't do it yet, d'oh! Too bad FLIP refuses to do the upgrade on Windows 10, so I need to make up for it tomorrow at a Windows 7 machine at work.

Modifying a stock SNES cart shell to hold the plugin adaptor is on my to do list as well.

[blue22]

If you did a small scale production on these (like the kazzo dumper) I would buy one!!!!!


I'd pay about $29.99 to $39.99 for it! So get to producing it (pretty please)!!!!!

[Retrofan]

I did the upgrade to Retrode firmware v0.26a beta today, and guess what: It werkz!







The Retrode also recognizes the Low Cost Flash HuCard by gamingenterprisesinc.com:
http://www.gamingenterprisesinc.com/Flash_HuCard/

I also tried the Tennokoe Bank card. The ROM can be dumped, though there's no access to its SRAM.

[Retrofan]

Regarding the Tennokoe Bank's SRAM, Chris Covell mentioned the following on the PC Engine forums:

Here's the Tennokoe Bank SRAM reading method, by the way:

Write #$68 to $0000 in bank $68. Then write 0 to $0000 in bank $78, then write #$73 to $0000 in bank $78 three times.
You can now map in bank $40 into, eg. $8000 and read up to $9FFF.

I hope this helps if there's an intention to make the SRAM readable/writeable with the Retrode with future firmware revisions. To those who don't know, the Tennokoe Bank card acts as a long-term backup method for savegames stored on the CD-ROM² system's and PC Engine Duo's internal SRAM. Since the system's SRAM is short-term capacitor backed and the Tennokoe bank card's SRAM is battery backed, they will only last for a certain time period. It could be handy to transfer savegames from the card to the PC and vice versa.