[skcin7]

I am in the process of doing this now... I have already hollowed out an old SUper Mario Kart and Super Mario World game cartridges. I just bought a 40gb and 60gb HDDs and 2 enclosure kits and I am waiting for them to come in the mail.............. I will post results here!

[Foxi4]

Incredibly misleading title. There's a huge difference between an "Making an HDD case out of an SNES Cartridge" and an "SNES Game Cart HDD" - you're making it sound like it's an HDD adapter FOR THE SNES. You should probably change that.

Edited by Foxi4, 25 November 2011 - 06:01 PM.

[skcin7]

I just finished my 2 SNES HDD cartridges and they are awesome!

I was going to just make one SNES game cart HDD, but decided to do two at the last minute. I found a lot of 2x used 2.5" laptop SATA hard drives being sold from a single eBay auction. The HDD are only 40GB and 60GB, which isn't much, but they only cost $31, so the price was good. Sure I would have preferred them both to be a TB drive, but I'm a broke-ass college student and can't quite afford $100 per drive at the moment. The Enclosure kits were an additional $5 each, equaling $10. Add in shipping, and it cost only around $50 to make both of these awesome SNES game cart HDDs!









I used the original Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart cartridge shells, but took out the PCBs just as you did. I donated the cartridge shells that were originally from NHL 95 and Madden to put these PCBs in, took the stickers off the original cart shells, and re-printed labels for Super Mario World and Super Mario Kart and put them on, so I was able to keep the games too. I just had to sacrifice 2 crappy sports games to keep them.

Thank you so much for the awesome tutorial. Despite this being a pretty easy tutorial to follow, I never would have thought of the idea on my own. Now I have two awesome drives that I can store secret files on because they disguise as a regular HDD. Awesome.

[alphamule]

You think this is cool - try the opposite. Use SRAM, a microcontroller, and a multiplexer(CPLD) to write to the SRAM from a SDHC slot. You'll NEVER need to swap carts or delete old ROMs for space ever again! For bonus points, make it work on any of the old systems using just a simple mechanical adapter board. I wonder what the price of 8MB of SRAM is... That's the largest I think any SNES game can be.

A dual-port SRAM sounds like the most elegant solution but those cost hundreds of dollars because only aerospace uses them... Yeah, it's obsolete thanks to cheap DRAM. Anyways, that would be great if one of the ports was SPI. I don't think there are 64Mb PSRAM's in 5V versions. DRAM would work if you use the microcontroller and careful timing to do refreshes. This would possibly (likely) cause some compatibility problems. Here's some choices if I was serious about building one:
1) AT52BC6402A is probably ideal since so few games are bigger than 2MB (16Mb) and the few that are can fit in Flash ROM. 4Mx16b Flash ROM, 1Mx16 PSRAM, and needs voltage conversion.
2) Pure SRAMs. Not feasible.
3) Plain standard DRAM modules from the 1990s. These would be cheap and people practically give them away. Would require careful glue logic design to emulate ROM. The microcontroller would help, immensely!
4) A pair of AM29F032B-90EC/Am29F032B-90EF chips would be big enough to hold any SNES game and runs on 5 volts. A 3-volt model such as the MX23L6410A/MX23L6423A/MX29GL640ETTI-70G would work, also but would need voltage conversion.
Meh, or just go here.


You could in theory use a SATA drive with the right microcontrollers to replace the SD card, but that would be just insane. Besides, there are probably SD(or SD-IO) to SATA converters somewhere on the market. Something to add an eSATA connector to embedded systems?

Edited by alphamule, 01 February 2012 - 08:50 AM.