Making SEGA Genesis cartridges

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pbj:
So far, I haven’t had to tie up Isaac and take him to the mountaintop but it occasionally feels like it.

Made another batch today. Sonic Complete I’m particularly proud of - a 4MB rom split across two 2MB chips and soldered onto a World Series Baseball 95 pcb. New battery and filter capacitor, it should last awhile. A couple other games slapped onto a common genesis SRAM pcb. The others are on repro boards in worthless sport game shells. When I’m in Hell with Joe Montana I hope he’s like, “why did you kill so many of my cartridges?” And I’ll be all like, “I’ll never forgive you for that NFC Championship and 74 cents each, bro.”

Cave Story and Starflight continue to vex me. My slave driver also wants Barkley 2 on an Accolade pcb and they’re just as bad as EA.

Anyway, the madness continues….

bobbyb13:
80 posts and this monument of build your own has already spun out of control on you.
:cheers:

Love it.

Malenko:

--- Quote from: pbj on June 20, 2022, 12:36:09 am ---My slave driver also wants Barkley 2 on an Accolade pcb and they’re just as bad as EA.

--- End quote ---

*wha-pshhhhhh*

You can put Barkely 2 in an EA case if its too much of a pain in the bootay. Wonder if anyone noticed I flipped the hero on the Shining Force 2 label? I am down right GIDDY for Grind Stormer

pbj:
A few more this morning....

:cheers:

pbj:
Anyway, it's time to reclaim the gameroom and decommission the Genesis factory for awhile. I've got ~30 more repro boards prepped with capacitors and 50 more EPROMs on the way from China. A large box stuffed full of games is en route to its new home.

But we had to go out with one final bang, of course. After I swore I'd never touch an EA board again, Malenko had a specific request for Barkley Shut Up & Jam 2 in an Accolade cartridge. Oddly, the two Barkley games shipped in both Sega and Accolade shells.

So, I cracked open a copy of Hardball 95, a saving Accolade PCB from the same time period as Barkley. The chip was very resistant to being pulled, I had to break it into pieces and pull it off forcefully. Then came the nightmare of trying to clean the holes out. Shop vac desoldering rig on both settings (suck AND blow!) helped some, but not much. Heating each hole with the iron and then blowing on them as hard as I could helped some, but not much. Nothing like a hot soldering iron two inches from your face. Flux and copper braid helped some, but not much. Then traces stared vaporizing and that was that. 3 hours of my life - gone. I cannot figure these EA and Accolade boards out.

Well, then I get a stupid idea... can a Sega board be crammed into an Accolade case? And the answer is YES! It will just barely fit over the mounting posts in the shell. The fingerboard juts out a little too far, and you have to notch out some of the plastic (unseen) so that the filter capacitor legs are clear. Other option would be to mount the capacitor elsewhere on the PCB, but eh.

To my knowledge, there's only one Barkley 2 ROM out there, and since we know it shipped on both types of PCBs, I put the chip on a 171-6278A board. This seems to be the most widely used 2MB eprom saving PCB. I've got dozens of them loose in a box now.

And damned if it didn't work. My team "GAMESUX" and their losing record was successfully saving.

Other semi-interesting thing about this is that an Accolade label is very close in size to an EA label with the title spine clipped off. So that's how we designed the label. Close enough.

I present my Frankenstein abomination game:

:cheers:

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