astar617
B. Jenet's Firstmate
- Joined
- Sep 5, 2008
- Posts
- 404
(hope you have a snack ready for this longish read)
So far it looks like the consensus has always been that there is no known way to back up data on Neo Geo memory cards. After giving it some thought, I might want to reopen the case for review, at least somewhat.
I am a UNIX hardware engineer for a living, and I know that SUN used to make an internal PCMCIA card reader in SBus form (a card form factor comparable with PCI or ISA but proprietary to Suns) in the 90s. After putting my thinking cap on, I'm guessing you could probably write a simple shell script to interface directly with the card reader and dump the media contents bit-for-bit into a binary image file, or write bit-for-bit back from one... I don't think it would require anything more than a dd with the appropriate blocksize from the abstracted representation of the reader ("/dev/whatever" if seen as a generic device; "/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZs2" if seen as a raw/character disk device) to a file on disk, or vice versa. Obviously no savegame-level granularity, but a definite step up from where we are.
Now I know that Wintel PCI adapters etc grow on trees, but the benefit of a commercial UNIX platform is twofold: 1) the vast majority of hardware peripherals were made by the OEM; 2) they are usually intended as development platforms for custom apps, so any required APIs for these first-party add-ons are usually well documented. Contrast this with Linux, where many times, support for generic off-the-shelf hardware requires reverse-engineering to create drivers (I could be wrong). So if more than a simple dd is needed, the documentation for lower level access should all be out there.
The PCMCIA readers aren't the most common SBus cards but If i get my hands on one and dd doesn't do the trick, maybe I can see about loaning it out to someone who knows their way around some code (I don't). I might even be convinced to cobble together an older SPARCstation 5 or something around it, running Solaris and a GNU toolchain as a dev platform.
If the above is greek to you, stay tuned for results if any are ever yielded. If you think you might have time/skills to assist, let me know and we'll discuss further. Proximity to SE New England would be a definite plus.
My final disclaimer is that this is all just guesswork while semi-bored, so let me know if any of this has already been disproven and we can end it there.
Thoughts?
-A
So far it looks like the consensus has always been that there is no known way to back up data on Neo Geo memory cards. After giving it some thought, I might want to reopen the case for review, at least somewhat.
I am a UNIX hardware engineer for a living, and I know that SUN used to make an internal PCMCIA card reader in SBus form (a card form factor comparable with PCI or ISA but proprietary to Suns) in the 90s. After putting my thinking cap on, I'm guessing you could probably write a simple shell script to interface directly with the card reader and dump the media contents bit-for-bit into a binary image file, or write bit-for-bit back from one... I don't think it would require anything more than a dd with the appropriate blocksize from the abstracted representation of the reader ("/dev/whatever" if seen as a generic device; "/dev/rdsk/cXtYdZs2" if seen as a raw/character disk device) to a file on disk, or vice versa. Obviously no savegame-level granularity, but a definite step up from where we are.
Now I know that Wintel PCI adapters etc grow on trees, but the benefit of a commercial UNIX platform is twofold: 1) the vast majority of hardware peripherals were made by the OEM; 2) they are usually intended as development platforms for custom apps, so any required APIs for these first-party add-ons are usually well documented. Contrast this with Linux, where many times, support for generic off-the-shelf hardware requires reverse-engineering to create drivers (I could be wrong). So if more than a simple dd is needed, the documentation for lower level access should all be out there.
The PCMCIA readers aren't the most common SBus cards but If i get my hands on one and dd doesn't do the trick, maybe I can see about loaning it out to someone who knows their way around some code (I don't). I might even be convinced to cobble together an older SPARCstation 5 or something around it, running Solaris and a GNU toolchain as a dev platform.
If the above is greek to you, stay tuned for results if any are ever yielded. If you think you might have time/skills to assist, let me know and we'll discuss further. Proximity to SE New England would be a definite plus.
My final disclaimer is that this is all just guesswork while semi-bored, so let me know if any of this has already been disproven and we can end it there.
Thoughts?
-A
