revolutionika, on Wed May 9, 2012 10:54 PM, said:
Jay, since you have experience with PCB's or maybe at least designing them (i think).
How difficult would it be to design a new pcb for a new multicart, maybe even using an sd card. but without directly stealing Chad Schells design?
Does the CC3 pcb 'pre-programmed' with any data/program/info or is it 'off the shelf' parts and the sd card is the brain and what makes it work?
I'm sorry, Rev ... I must have missed this question earlier.
The CC3 is among the more sophisticated multi-carts. It contains a
microcontroller with integrated flash memory, and as GroovyBee said earlier, this is the "brain" of the CC3. When you select a cartridge from the menu, it is copied from the SD card into a RAM chip so it can be executed by the Intellivision, with the microcontroller handling the decoding and bankswitching. It's much more complex than the
board I designed for the
Aquaricart, which simply banks in an ordinary EPROM. I was able to work some "CC3-like" features into my software, but my goal with the hardware was to make it as simple and as inexpensive as possible, and it's quite primitive by comparison.
It's very possible to create a new multi-cart along the same lines as the CC3 or the
AtariMax 5200 Ultimate SD cartridge, but it will probably have to be offered at a similar price point, since it would require similar components and a similar design. It took six years for Chad Schell to sell off his initial run of CC3 boards, so anyone with the skills to create such a cartridge would have to go into it knowing that they may not get a return on their investment for several years, and that a large percentage of the (very small) potential market has already been satisfied by the CC3. Whether anyone would be willing to take that risk, I don't know.