- Joined
- Nov 10, 2001
- Posts
- 908
Hey Guys,
Over the last several weeks I have been experimenting with compact flash cards as an alternative to the pcmcia memory cards for the NEO-GEO. I have not had much luck and I am looking to see if someone here can figure this whole thing out.
First some background.
I grew tired of the extremely limited capabilities of the original NEO-GEO 2-kilobyte memory cards back in 1993 or so. I purchased a Panasonic SRAM card as an alternative and it has been my main memory card ever since. They came in sizes ranging from 32k on up to 4 meg. I myself have a 64k As far as compatibility is concerned, The card has always worked with every single NEO-GEO game with but only one exception, Riding Hero.
(I explained this in detail in a previous post as well as in my neogeo memory card faq)
Recently, I was looking for a cheaper and more modern alternative to those old bulky out dated cards. I purchased a compact flash card adaptor which has a jeida standard pinout (compatible with the neogeo mem card reader?) and allows compact flash cards to plug into it. I was very excited about it because if successfull, it would allow me to use more "modern" and cheap memory cards for the neo. The adaptor is only about $10 and 2mb compact flash cards sell for $3 on ebay all day long because they are useless (not enough memory) for modern day cfc users.
Everything looked great until I tried it. Basically, it doesn't work. When I try to format the card in the memory card utility on the NEO it says "unable to format card / memory card is write protected" Physically, there is no write protect "slide switch" on CFC's such as is found on the panasonic cards. And electronically, there is no way (at least not on my computer) to "disable" write protection.
The only other ideas I came up with were that maybe I could format the CFC's on my computer in a different file system. (in other words maybe the neo can only read CFC cards if they are pre-formatted a certain way. The cpu only allows formatting in the FAT format however. Any way to change that? I tried everything.
Hopefully someone here will work with me on trying to figure this out. The few techs whom I have discussed this with here and there have told me that nobody has really ever had the interest and/or the initiative to sit down and figure out the details of the neo-geo memory card standard. IMHO, figuring this out would be fun for us all because we would be able to save files and email them to eachother on all of the games.
Well, let me know if anyone here has any ideas.
Thanks for reading,
Billy Pitt
Over the last several weeks I have been experimenting with compact flash cards as an alternative to the pcmcia memory cards for the NEO-GEO. I have not had much luck and I am looking to see if someone here can figure this whole thing out.
First some background.
I grew tired of the extremely limited capabilities of the original NEO-GEO 2-kilobyte memory cards back in 1993 or so. I purchased a Panasonic SRAM card as an alternative and it has been my main memory card ever since. They came in sizes ranging from 32k on up to 4 meg. I myself have a 64k As far as compatibility is concerned, The card has always worked with every single NEO-GEO game with but only one exception, Riding Hero.
(I explained this in detail in a previous post as well as in my neogeo memory card faq)
Recently, I was looking for a cheaper and more modern alternative to those old bulky out dated cards. I purchased a compact flash card adaptor which has a jeida standard pinout (compatible with the neogeo mem card reader?) and allows compact flash cards to plug into it. I was very excited about it because if successfull, it would allow me to use more "modern" and cheap memory cards for the neo. The adaptor is only about $10 and 2mb compact flash cards sell for $3 on ebay all day long because they are useless (not enough memory) for modern day cfc users.
Everything looked great until I tried it. Basically, it doesn't work. When I try to format the card in the memory card utility on the NEO it says "unable to format card / memory card is write protected" Physically, there is no write protect "slide switch" on CFC's such as is found on the panasonic cards. And electronically, there is no way (at least not on my computer) to "disable" write protection.
The only other ideas I came up with were that maybe I could format the CFC's on my computer in a different file system. (in other words maybe the neo can only read CFC cards if they are pre-formatted a certain way. The cpu only allows formatting in the FAT format however. Any way to change that? I tried everything.
Hopefully someone here will work with me on trying to figure this out. The few techs whom I have discussed this with here and there have told me that nobody has really ever had the interest and/or the initiative to sit down and figure out the details of the neo-geo memory card standard. IMHO, figuring this out would be fun for us all because we would be able to save files and email them to eachother on all of the games.
Well, let me know if anyone here has any ideas.
Thanks for reading,
Billy Pitt
