This forum has a lot of love for AW games, so I will share some details about how @MetalliC and I worked together to build a software backup / cart dumping kit for Atomiswave.
AW carts often have 4, 8, or even 16 flash chips. Desoldering and resoldering that many chips is very labor intensive, and may result in damage to the cart circuit board.
On the left is a development cartridge with 16 flash chips. On the right is a SEGA type AW cartridge which has 4 flash chips on the front, and 4 more flash chips on the back.
So last year MetalliC asked me if we could work together and solve how to get custom code/software running on AW. He already had a plan with some Naomi software patched for AW to read cart memory and output via the AW serial port to a PC.
It was my job to solve the hardware, which included flashing the code onto a cartridge and building a serial cable to connect to host PC.
The donor cartridge for the task was KOF:NeoWave. Lucky for me to do testing it only involved de-soldering/soldering a single flash chip. It took several rounds of testing, but the board held up to being re-soldered 6-7 times
Took apart my AW to confirm the DB-9 connector next to the VGA connector was indeed RS232 serial. Confirmed it uses standard pinout and serial, with rx/tx bits inverted. Luckily I had an authentic FT232D cable on hand, which can be internally reconfigured from a PC to invert rx/tx bits. Here is the "kit":
Works by simply connecting serial cable from AW to PC. Insert KOF:NW cart, power on. Hot swap and remove kofnw, insert new cartridge for backup. Enter console command on PC and data transfers to host PC for backup
AW carts often have 4, 8, or even 16 flash chips. Desoldering and resoldering that many chips is very labor intensive, and may result in damage to the cart circuit board.
On the left is a development cartridge with 16 flash chips. On the right is a SEGA type AW cartridge which has 4 flash chips on the front, and 4 more flash chips on the back.
So last year MetalliC asked me if we could work together and solve how to get custom code/software running on AW. He already had a plan with some Naomi software patched for AW to read cart memory and output via the AW serial port to a PC.
It was my job to solve the hardware, which included flashing the code onto a cartridge and building a serial cable to connect to host PC.
The donor cartridge for the task was KOF:NeoWave. Lucky for me to do testing it only involved de-soldering/soldering a single flash chip. It took several rounds of testing, but the board held up to being re-soldered 6-7 times
Took apart my AW to confirm the DB-9 connector next to the VGA connector was indeed RS232 serial. Confirmed it uses standard pinout and serial, with rx/tx bits inverted. Luckily I had an authentic FT232D cable on hand, which can be internally reconfigured from a PC to invert rx/tx bits. Here is the "kit":
Works by simply connecting serial cable from AW to PC. Insert KOF:NW cart, power on. Hot swap and remove kofnw, insert new cartridge for backup. Enter console command on PC and data transfers to host PC for backup
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