https://www.patreon.com/prof_abrasive/posts
This looks to be getting interesting...
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https://www.patreon.com/prof_abrasive/posts
This looks to be getting interesting...
Hopefully this thing gets released this year. Would be so awesome playing saturn discs from usb sticks.
Is this project going anywhere?
The original video gave me the impression that most of the work had already been done. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know exactly what's involved in bringing a product like this to market, so I'm guessing that progress has happened fairly steadily since the original announcement. Surely he's close to launch by now?
AFAIK he is struggling to get them to the market - finding good places to mass produce them, building his QA test bench, getting components, etc.
It sucks that he put his latest updates to be patreon only, so I'm not up to date with the progress. I hope I'll be able to test it once the devices are out.
any news about the satiator?
I'm not paying Patreon for what are generally quite uninspiring updates. He talked about eXFAT awhile ago, then the other day posted about shells yet again.
In the professors words, it is "finally close to shipping".Quote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
shipping to patreons only or finally selling to everyone?
It kind of looks sexy. Like Soap Bars or something?
Attachment 15173https://i.redd.it/m00qdhjb7yx31.jpg
For prototypes, it's not bad (I didn't follow, they might be even 3d printed?).
Paint it black or grey, leave space for a sticker and you got a deal. You could even make the satiator text spray painted gold (Megadrive colour scheme), white (PAL colour scheme), or have the plastic grey/white with black/purple logo (jp colour scheme), etc.
My only concern is about whether they fit in the slot or not, since the MPEG cards use a thin metal layer that hugs the port very closely (if the metal is bent a little, you can barely insert the card). A plastic case as thin as the MPEG cards would be brittle, so it has to be made thicker, and then it may not have enough space. But I'm guessing that this is something that was at least tested in advance.
Either way, hopefully we'll soon see.
Unfortunately I can't access the last patron-only posts, this may have been addressed there.
Only the beta units for now.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
Yeah that's obviously 3d-printed with the extrusion method (cheapest). That can't be colored easily, it'd be by hand.
I prefer if they make it black.
I also hope it will fit the mpeg slot without issues.
It plugs in the back? Does the color really matter? I know I don't see the back of my consoles when they are up on the shelf connected up for use. Unless you are using a mirror back glass behind your consoles?Quote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
Oh haha true enough, once plugged in you'll never see it. And in that regard, any sort of paint job whatsoever would be a liability, since it would scrape off while being inserted or removed.
I'm interested in buying one, but I don't have a 'Siega'. Hopefully it'll work with my Sega console.
Does this cartridge have the same problem of the PCB being too thick so as to stretch out the connectors in the Saturn like Action Replay did? I might get one to play Saturn Grandia in english with the patch. I want to rip my copy of it from CD and patch it to play on the system through this device. I only do things legally for the most part. Also want to know if you can dump your bios for emulators through it.
That's an urban legend that has been debunked repeatedly. ARs and pretty much all carts use the same thickness PCBs, and also it is an industry standard size. I think there's one card that is half a milli thicker but it's some obscure mega memory card with 80k blocks. And even then, the Saturn cart slot isn't killed by the slightly thicker card, the problem is just that the pins are so small that the connectors get contact problems if there's even minimal amounts of dirt on them.Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeckidy
that's true, still I prefer black :DQuote:
Originally Posted by CrossBow
Also I hope that you don't have to left the expansion port open to make it fit.
I don't think it's an urban legend.Quote:
Originally Posted by zyrobs
In my experience the official Sega carts are recognized by the console as soon as they are inserted.
The infamous CD+Plus (the one with the JP mega drive cart shell) that should have a thicker PCB "that could damage the slot", is recognized easily.
While other carts that should have thinner PCB like Saturn CD Key or AR can tooks even 50 attempts before being recognized and sometime you just have to give up.
No, it's not. The 8 MEG (Black) Memory Carts were terrible for not being recognized by the Saturn same for the early Pro Uni Adapter (also black) and could mess up your Saturn. I'm not sure if they were ever sold outside the UK mindQuote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
That said I can't help but feel that SEGA used a cheap cart slot inside the Saturn and should and could have been a lot better
I haven't seen what it looks like inserted of course, but if the SD card sticking out is any indication, I'm going to guess, this will require leaving the rear cover off in order to use it as the SD card might stick out too far to allow the entire thing to be closed up. Also, it might make it difficult to remove the card from the Saturn if it is recessed in too far. Similar to how the blinking light win on the NES can make removal of NES carts kinda a pain.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
I just measured my Saturn carts with a Vernier, the action replay, two backup memory carts, and two RAM Expansions all measured to 16mm. So no, the AR is not thicker. I still maintain that they just get dusty too easily, every time I have cart problems I can just clean the carts and they'll work. It's tiresome but it is what it is.
I also had to clean up MPEG carts in the past to get them working. In every case, you could see visible dust marks in the middle of the pins of all the carts.
absolutely agree.Quote:
Originally Posted by Team Andromeda
By the way since I have to buy a new Action replay, do you know for your experience, if there is a good Action Replay or another adapter that doesn't have have this issue?
you're right, hope they hit the sweet spot so you can close the reare cover without making it a pain to remove when necessary.Quote:
Originally Posted by CrossBow
Leaving it open would be cheap for what is (seems) otherwise an elegant solution.
We'll see.
The standard Action Replay 4+1 cart is exactly as thick as the official backup/ram carts.Quote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
The problem isn't the cart slot being cheaply made - it has too many pins, so each pin has to be thinner, and so minimum amount of dirt on the pins or the cartridge can cause contact issues. The be more reliable, the cartridge slot needs to be either wider, or have fewer pins. If they removed all the CPU accesses and left it as a data-only port, then the problem wouldn't have occurred, but they wanted to put all those pins there because of all the problems they had with expanding the Megadrive (the Megadrive lacked CPU interrupts or video input pins in the cart and ext connectors, resulting in the Mega CD and the 32x both requiring expensive and unreliable workarounds).
The MPEG expansion slot has the same pin pitch as the cart slot, by the way, so don't expect there to be no issues with it once the Satiator comes out.
edit: regarding the action replay, as well as some of the "mega memory" carts, they use an internal firmware either to compress saves, move saves, act as a region unlock cart, etc. However the firmware and the save data is on the same flash chip, so if there's a faulty write when copying a save file, there's a chance for the firmware to get corrupted (it gets partially overwritten making it unable to boot). So there's a chance that they can brick themselves no matter what, which can explain all those "cart is not working" issues. You can unbrick them with a firmware patcher luckily, but the savegames will be lost.
Backup memory carts can sometimes go corrupted the same way too. I had to write a memory cart parser once to recover my lost saves, it wasn't fun. It's why I'm hoping that the Satiator can save stuff to the SD card, so I can back up my save games more easily.
The latter white ones were a lot better. I still also still have the old back ones and can tell you from personal experience it's No Myth' the launch 8 Meg cart was horrible and that backline you can see on the Universal adaptor was where I had to mark the line where the cart should be sitting, for the Cart to work. But I got my Universal adaptor on the launch of Bug in the USA in 1995 and thankfully Datel improved the Carts later onQuote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
https://i.imgur.com/EL1SPnu.jpg
You made good points.Quote:
Originally Posted by zyrobs
What I don't understand is this, in my case I have the ST Key, that is a simple and very common import adapter (at least back in the day) with no other functions, so I don't think it has problem with firmware corruptions.
ST Key always had problem being recognized since day one, sometime it could be worse with dirt, but even after lots of cleaning, it never worked fine.
Then I have the infamous CD+Plus, another adapter only, notorious among the community to have a thinker PCB that could damage the slot pins.
I don't know if it's true, but what I can say is this cart never need any cleaning, it work as soon as you insert it, but you can easlily feel that it's harder to insert in the slot than other carts...
Maybe there are multiple causes, but I cannot exclude the PCB variable thickness.
Any news about satiator?
He's shipped all the Beta units, and those people have been testing for several weeks. From what I've read, most games are running fine. There's some FMV hiccups, but he had them working previously, so it's a matter of figuring out what he "broke."
https://youtu.be/digVewVEqGg
Very much looking forward to this! Does anyone know what format the disc images need to be in? I know the Phoebe and Rhea need them to be in Disc Juggler format, of all things. That disappointed me because I was hoping for a format that would be far more obscure and annoying to deal with. Nobody wants it easy! J/K I hope it likes ISO + WAV or BINs and CUEs or both or all!
Wonder if the issue is actually the SDcards themselves? I know when I got my Atari 5200 AtariMax SD, that one of the first things I tested on it was the Bad Apple demo. It ran but did so at inconsistent speed and just jerky overall. I was using the SDcard that came with the atarimax cart at the time. I then thought I would try using a faster class SDcard and sure enough the demo ran smoothly once I did that.Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg2600
So again it could be more to do with the quality and speed of the read/write of the SD cards vs the satiator itself?
This is from about a year ago on the Patreon page:Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Redifer
Quote:
currently, it supports ISO and BIN/CUE. ... The BIN/CUE support handles multiple files (eg .iso + .cdr audio). It doesn't currently handle WAV tracks but that should be easy to add.
Rhea supports CloneCD, which is like a bin/cue plus a subcode file and a different descriptor. The key is that Rhea needs subcodes to work because the device is not strong enough to *generate* subcode data.Quote:
Originally Posted by Joe Redifer
Satiator does not need or use subcodes but as a consequence things like seeking in the cd player do not work. There are also some a handful of games using multiple track indexes which are not handled yet. And CD+G discs probably also do not work.
I'm watching ReEnthused (Twitch) https://www.twitch.tv/reenthused and he's testing a new fix for FMV. Seems the FMV skipping is fixed though sound effects are a bit laggy (probably due to his capture card).
hope this could be mass produced soon.
I'm also looking for these features:
-ability to change console region discs, just like a normal EU/US/JP adapter, but via Satiator
-support for cheat codes and homebrew
-save cart funcions
Anybody mentioned these features?
Do you have the black (1st Edition) Action Replay? That was the 1st one I had bought back in 1995. My memory carts worked fine, until I used that fat POS.Quote:
Originally Posted by zyrobs
https://www.patreon.com/posts/featur...ron_engagementQuote:
Originally Posted by Virtua Hunter
Granted that feature update is a year old, I don't think he's changed much since then.
--Definitely bypasses region locking.
--Does not interefere with the cart slot, so saves, RAM, and AR will function as is. He wasn't sure at the time how AR boot sequence affects it. Though it doesn't interact with the internal save mechanism, no reason something can't be written to do so.
--Supporting ISO and BIN/CUE formats, including multi-disc games (swapping).
--Does not support Video CD emulation, nor will it.
--Load times will mirror the OEM CD Drive.
--WAV support has to be added, MP3 will not be supported.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Greg2600
Thanks
It's not clear if the region bypass works only for ISO or also for retail discs.
I believe it was mentioned that it'll let all region original discs work as well, but I'm too busy to test it now...
*I'm pretty sure that Satiator only comes online if you're disc drive is empty; therefore, it will likely not act like an Action Replay and allow other region discs to play.
From the ReEnthused Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2yMWUPr9l8Quote:
We take another look at the Satiator after updating to the newest firmware.
Firmware 73:
Fixes FMV stuttering
Speeds up menu loading when there are lots of files
Adds page switching with shoulder buttons
First attempts at implementing audio indexing