saturn ram cart questions

adding another mini saturn thread. this is to do with the ram cart. Its been ages since I've played games with ram cart, and I just bought kof '96 off ebay - it comes with the 2 mb cart. I was wondering - can I play kof 97' with this too?
also, if I where to get the 4 mb cart, these games won't load faster would they?

Are you sure that is a 2mb cart?

As far as I know, Capcom games uses the 2mb carts, and SNK games uses 4mb carts.

Well, I can be worng. I read it in a faq sometime ago, but never played these games on my saturn.

As far as I remember SNK used the 1MB cart and Capcom used the 4mb cart.
KOF 97 should run with either cart, but I'm pretty sure you can not use the 4mb cart on 96 or 95.

From a portuguese faq (DR can ready this, I'm pretty sure about this):

You are right, Ron. Earlier SNK games used th 1mb carts, later games used 2mb (and 3mb???) carts.

Capcom used the 4mb carts.

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Cartucho de Expansão de Memória: Esse cartucho continha mais memória de vídeo para melhorar sensivelmente os gráficos de jogos que se usavam dela. Esse novidade começou com a SNK que usou cartuchos de 1MB inicialmente para diminuir o tempo de carregamento dos jogos compatíveis e aumentar a qualidade gráfica dos mesmos.

Depois novos cartuchos com mais memória foram sendo lançados(2 e 3MB).
Quando a CAPCOM anunciou a conversão de X-Men Vs Street Fighter para o Saturn havia sérias dúvidas de que só um cartucho não seria suficiente, mas a CAPCOM anunciou que o jogo usaria um novo cartucho de 4MB que reduziu a quase zero o tempo de carregamento e permitiu gráficos fiéis ao jogo de Arcade.
Novos jogos foram lançados utilizando esse cartucho o que contribuiu muito para
o sucesso do Saturn, principalmente no Japão. Essses cartuchos vieram de parcerias entre a SEGA e a SNK e a CAPCOM.

OK here's the deal:

KOF 95 has it's own special RAM cart
KOF 96 uses the 1 MB cart ONLY. It will run with the 4MB cart but there are graphics problems
KOF 97 uses both the 1MB and the 4MB carts.

Syxx573 said:

OK here's the deal:

KOF 95 has it's own special RAM cart
KOF 96 uses the 1 MB cart ONLY. It will run with the 4MB cart but there are graphics problems
KOF 97 uses both the 1MB and the 4MB carts.

Click to expand...

Correction on KOF 95, it's actually a ROM cart as it contains actual game data.

Just get a 4/5 in 1, it'll solve your problems.

Later

shir0

Syxx573 said:

OK here's the deal:

KOF 95 has it's own special RAM cart
KOF 96 uses the 1 MB cart ONLY. It will run with the 4MB cart but there are graphics problems
KOF 97 uses both the 1MB and the 4MB carts.

Click to expand...

adding to that, true you can use Capcom's 4mb with '97. tho, it'll still only use 1mb out of the total 4.

1) It's best to play regular games with the regular 1MB RAM cart, and only use the 4MB cart with the 4MB games. There weren't that many 4MB games, and they were mostly Capcom. Vampire Saviour, Pocket Fighter, X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, and Dungeons & Dragons Collection are all the titles that I know of. I'm pretty sure that Street Fighter Alpha 3 also used it, but I don't own a copy myself so I can't confirm.

2) None of the SNK games used the 4MB cart: they all used the 1MB cart, with the exception of KOF95, which had it's own dedicated ROM cart (as Syxx and SamShoSensei already pointed out). Thanks to this dedicated cart, KOF95 had very fast loading times, and was a pretty faithful port. Someone mentioned having graphical problems when playing the 1MB games with the 4MB cart: Samurai Showdown 4 also had these problems.

3) Constant switching of carts (between 1MB, 4MB, the KOF95 cart, and the memory cart) wears down the contacts inside your Saturn, and it eventually stops reading them. In order to prevent this it's best to buy a 4-In-1 Cart (or to buy a separate Saturn for each of your carts). Here's a pretty good FAQ I found that explains about the 4-In-1 in more detail:

http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/saturn/file/saturn_4_in_1.txt