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Lynx Multi Cart


SainT

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Lol, no, that is a good summary. Everything is good. :grin:

 

Where the bizarre interjections about memory card speed and resetting come from, I'm really not sure. That's something I was talking about right at the beginning of the thread before I'd figured out how I was going to deal with everything.

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I've just not had the time to sort out my pick n place tool, so I've done a board the old fashioned way with tweezers and a reflow gun. Was easier than I'd expected, seems to have come out ok after sorting a couple of solder bridges. Not going to get a chance to see if I my soldering is ok until tomorrow evening now. But this is what the finished units are roughly going to look like...

Hi, if you finaly managed to make a worling prototype micro sd flashcard for the lynx, i will buy one, you can alway's look at me to contact me.

I feel my hearth already pumping faster ,getting warm fuzzy feelings,i feel i got very coriouse now.

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I've just not had the time to sort out my pick n place tool, so I've done a board the old fashioned way with tweezers and a reflow gun. Was easier than I'd expected, seems to have come out ok after sorting a couple of solder bridges. Not going to get a chance to see if I my soldering is ok until tomorrow evening now. But this is what the finished units are roughly going to look like...

This prototype sd flascard for the lynx looks awesome and very promising,now i only wonder why i ditn't found one via google, i tryed everything, i just found this awaited picture by accident by following this forum.

Now, this site still confuses me alot but i think got the hang on it now.

Anyway am desperate to place an order once those working prototypes are ready for production.

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Ok, I have something working. My reflow skills are not great, so the first board didn't work and then I killed the PIC chip figuring out why. So I tried again and after a bit of debugging and fixing some bad solder joints it's finally loading up a game. It just loads "lynx.rom" directly from the SD card into the SRAM, then hands control over to the Lynx. So it sits on the "Insert Game" screen for a few seconds, then the game appears. Jiimmy Connors Tennis starts up just fine now. :D

 

I can't play it yet, though, as I'm driving the Lynx bus directly all the time through the 245 chip to test everything. The bus ends up getting shared by the control pad and buttons, so it's interfering with the controls currently. The next job will be hooking up one of the configurable logic cells in the PIC so the bus is only driven when the chip strobe is low then I should be able to actually play something.

 

I'm just about at the proof of concept stage now. Just a couple more things to sort and this will be properly working. :grin:

This picture alone is a wetdream for lynx fans like me, no matter how i googled around, i couldn't find 1 picture of this, not one, just insane, but am glad i found it, now i only got my hands on it on one day once fully complete.

This surely opens new dours for homebrewers,like making games with sampled sound and animations or putting a level editor to store your creations on the sd cart, the potential is there, i will thumb for you to make money out of this project, good luck.

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How can SD be too "slow"? Some of the faster SD cards can do read upward of 100Mb/sec (UHS-3 for example), far faster than what Lynx RAM can be written to. Plus most of the games are 512k or less, the entire ROM could have been copied to flash cart's temp SRAM when on flash cart menu, then reboot Lynx to load the game off SRAM.

 

SD card have been used in N64 and 32X flash carts without any issues. Those could easily run circles around Lynx on overall processing power. There's even working Playstation 1 SD adapter to play CD ISO, and that's as much as 600MB or more per disc. (granted, it loads about the same speed as original CD mechanism, 300Kb/sec max which even the pokey class 2 SD will handle fine)

 

I totaly agree with you here,but someone here wroted that once he tested the sd cart on the lynx, the lynx was expecting reading the bootstrap from it way too fast,but since you mentioned that sd cards also can/have a fast transfer speed, i guess that guy probably just used a slow sd card to test it out,haha.

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Yeah since you mentioned it, YES I FINALY SAW A PROTOTYPE of the sd flash cart for the lynx from saint, HOWEVER, the problem was whatever i was searching trough google i couldn't find any picture of, no nothing, untill i dit come across here, followed this tread and,,, BINGO i finaly saw 3 images of it, oh man what a releave, now am convinced, i gonne buy one as soon when i gets into production,hey hey.

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Here you go! There will likely be another pcb revision yet to tidy things up a bit, but this is working.

 

 

I may even provide some kind of abs plastic shell over the chips as an optional extra as I've bought myself a 3D printer since I stared the project.

 

The coloured cable is the icsp cable for the pic micro, by the way. It won't be on the production units... :)

Hi, i wonder were those 6 wires were used for,or are these wires just for testing this flashcard or something?

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I totaly agree with you here,but someone here wroted that once he tested the sd cart on the lynx, the lynx was expecting reading the bootstrap from it way too fast,but since you mentioned that sd cards also can/have a fast transfer speed, i guess that guy probably just used a slow sd card to test it out,haha.

Wouldn't holding down the Lynx power button for a couple seconds create a seudo extended reset period giving the OS enough time to load? If not, then you will need a boot ROM to strap the OS and access the SD card, in addition to volatile RAM or flash memory.
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Argh! Right, there are no issues. Johannesmutlu, please read the entire thread and stop posting about issues which were solved months ago, you are confusing the hell out of everyone and filling this thread with noise.

 

Delayed startup is handled by simply disabling the Lynx bus while power is on, this keeps it in the "insert cartridge" stage, you then enable the bus when your data is available.

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Argh! Right, there are no issues. Johannesmutlu, please read the entire thread and stop posting about issues which were solved months ago, you are confusing the hell out of everyone and filling this thread with noise.

 

Delayed startup is handled by simply disabling the Lynx bus while power is on, this keeps it in the "insert cartridge" stage, you then enable the bus when your data is available.

Yeah your right i got to stop filling this thread with noise , but the fact is this site cobfuses the shit out of me in the ins & outs, now i slowly got the hang on it, the main issues was anytime i was talking about those (solved) problems, and post them, it dit NOT see my posted message untill i come back later,so i alway's first tout that my message wasn't posted or something,now i try to eliminate my posted useless bombed noise.

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Hi, am waiting till you are ready to recieve orders for production of those sd flashcard pcb's for the lynx.

You can contact me trough my emailadress johannesmutlu@hotmail.com to keep me updated, or check me on facebook just type in johannesmutlu.

 

Thanks for your info, i learned from my mistakes on this site,because i saw your prototypes pcb,stupid google ditn't view them, i discovered them by coincidence,again sorry for my spreaded noise.

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