Existing games => Cartridges

[TFM]

Back to Cartridge molds!

[mr_lou]

Back to Cartridge molds!

Definitely! Get molding!

(But just for the record, I shall hence forth be known as "the one who was blessed by Gryzor the wise").

[TFM]

Well... guess you needed it 

Molding... molding... molding... molding... ... ... still molding... and molding...

[ivarf]

 

when we get a final solution

/Offtopic
My line of thought abruptly derailed when reading this. All my fault as I watched this movie yesterday, The Grey Zone (2001) 
Sorry

[TFM]

Oh please. Put fiction to offtopic, let's find a solution for getting cartridge shells here.
Everything else is not a problem. Only shells seem not to be existing...

[mr_lou]

Everything else is not a problem.

Is that 100% certain? All the experts here agree? Cartridges can easily be made? Even without ACID chips? There are no problems whatsoever? Only the plastic cases are missing?

[TFM]

in short... YES!

[Trebmint]

Lovely idea, but tooling for a case mould like this would cost £4-8k unless theres a cheaper way of doing it

[MacDeath]

So, what is the basic cost for :


>>Getting a mold built?
>>Getting casing molded then?


I suppose someone with mecanic and technical design skills could do the design, somewone with machinetool (milling machine) could even usinate the mold, prodvided you know the specifications/matrix for the molding machine.
Coudln't some universities or school provide this? do someone have a friend teacher in machinetools?


Then the card...
Can someone do some sales quote for the components and printedcircuit?
Seriously, we should aim for 1000 "blank" products... on the long term it could be great.
Having this quantity would enable and motivate coders do provide...

OS, super graphic+sound apps, and games.

512K ROM is simply a dream on the PLUS, nope?

Sadly, 1k production would also mean lots of solderings (kits?) to be done (who as a "wave" at home?), and put a lot of cash on the table.
Few resistors, printed cards and few chips and "EPROM/FLASHROM" ? x1000? ouch...
even at 20€uro piece, it would be 20.000 €uros...mmmh, perhaps not 1000 then.

QuickStarter anyone?

That the main problem.
to have a good price, need to do a lot, but to do a lot still means a lot of money to put on the table first.

I guess a pair of good 512K well programmed games sold at 100 original pieces each with quite "high price" (well, "modern" price... 50euros? 60€uros) would easily give back a large chunk of the money.
Or not.

Cool stuff would be to get lower prices for "friends" frome the community, and manage to sell higher price for those lone collectionners who happen to own a GX4000 alongside their whole set of varied consoles.

Yes, a Polish GX4000 scam...

[TFM]

QuickStarter anyone?

That may be a GREAT idea!

[steve]

If it is going to cost a lot to make a cartridge then maybe Bryce could develop a "multicart" with a 2MB rom and 2 switches to select one of four 512K "pages".

[mr_lou]

I read that it's possible to take multiple existing games and put them onto 1 cartridge. You could even make a menu for selecting which game. But since the GX4000 doesn't have a keyboard, this menu would have to be joystick controlled.

I think, putting multiple games onto one cartridge, will increase the interest a bit. Developers could work together, and for example make a cartridge containing Star Sabre + Dead on Time + Super Edge Grinder + Star Sabre Zero + R-type, and call it "Modern CPC Space Shooters" or something like that.

There's also the option that Bryce is working on: A 16-game cart (I think it was?), where you use hardware switches on the cartridge to select a game.

Another fantasy cartridge, would be one that acts kinda like the HxC: You stuff in a SD card, and can then select DSK's and/or CPR files. Probably impossible though. 


Right, how to make the plastic cases. Do they have to be made of plastic? Is there another material that might be easier to work with?

For plastic cases, we need someone here at the forum to take charge, and look into it. Contact various companies who makes plastic cases, and ask them about possibilities and pricing etc? Indeed I also believe we'd need to buy at least 1000 of them. But it'll take some time before we get that far, so everyone has plenty of time to go win the lottery 

But who'll take charge? (Preferably one of the experts).

[Bryce]

The MultiCart I was working on is a 16x 128K version (this could be 4x 512k too if that's preferred), but with software selection, no jumper switches. Unfortunately the ACID replacement is what's holding it back. The CPLD solution takes up a lot of PCB space and is relatively expensive, so Nilquaders solution is what I was concentrating on, but I'm not 100% happy with that either. The ideal solution as far as I'm concerned would be a PAL / GAL solution.

Bryce.

[arnoldemu]

The MultiCart I was working on is a 16x 128K version (this could be 4x 512k too if that's preferred), but with software selection, no jumper switches. Unfortunately the ACID replacement is what's holding it back. The CPLD solution takes up a lot of PCB space and is relatively expensive, so Nilquaders solution is what I was concentrating on, but I'm not 100% happy with that either. The ideal solution as far as I'm concerned would be a PAL / GAL solution.

Bryce.

for the interested, I already modified a standard plus basic cart to work with Bryce's hardware.
I had plans to make another menu controlled by joystick but that was never started.

[ralferoo]

I worked out some of the design for reprogrammable-over-USB 512MB flash cartridge, but the component costs would be about £11 just for the chips (CPLD, flash and Atmega), and in around 100-unit quantities the PCB would also add a few pounds to that. In smaller quantities, the PCB would be a substantial portion of the cost.

At the moment though, I'm working to a deadline with the next revision of my FPGA emulator, so although I spent a couple of evenings working on the cartridge stuff, it's gone back to being fairly low down on my priority list for a couple of months until I get this next FPGA board layout done.

[mr_lou]

The ideal solution as far as I'm concerned would be a PAL / GAL solution.

I have no idea what a PAL / GAL solution is, but if Bryce says it would be the ideal solution, then I have no doubt that it is the ideal solution.

So why aren't we just going in that direction? Is it because we can't agree? Or does it require too much PCB space as well? Too expensive?

[arnoldemu]

for the interested, I already modified a standard plus basic cart to work with Bryce's hardware.
I had plans to make another menu controlled by joystick but that was never started.

A wiki page to collect the information, for most it can be links to existing wiki articles to show what has been done, but it can also exist to hold information towards our goal:

Modern Cartridges - CPCWiki

[Bryce]

A PAL or GAL is very like a CPLD / FPGA / ASIC, ie: it a chip that has programmable logic inside. Unlike CPLDs they exist in very small simple versions, that can replace just a few standard Logic ICs. They also come in DIL format, making them easier to solder for beginners. The 6128 uses a PAL for memory mapping.

Here's the simplest version: GAL 16V8-25LP - GAL DIL-20 bei reichelt elektronik

Bryce.

[Trebmint]

We seem a long way off this TBH. Perhaps because unlike other machines like the atari we can produce on disk or tape.
1st is there really a need? To make casing worthwhile you'd have to produce 2000+ to get the cost at around £3 each as far as i can work out. How many plus new games would be produced anyway? And sticking them all on one large cart sounds great but - cases and pcbs require volume of sorts so combining games reduces the sales and makes moulds etc unviable.
Really it would have to be 1 cart = 1 game to make sense.
How many copies would a cart sell? So how many new games would we need? To make sense it would have to Sell at £30 minimum. Is there even a market for them?
2nd a case needs to CAD designed. Do we stick to the existing case exactly?
My suggestion is that we find the optimum case/pcb design and cost and then form an alliance of a number of people to share the cost of getting them supplied and act as a publisher for new software

[Bryce]

The real problem is that Commodore, Atari, MSX and a few others all had Cartridge support on all of their machines. Most Amstrads didn't have a cartridge port, so it's only going to be interesting for Plus owners and they are a small minority in the CPC scene. If there was a cartridge expansion for the standard CPC, this might change, but it would also mean that new cartridge games would have to detect the machine type and switch off plus features when connected to a Classic CPC. The original cartridge games all use plus features as far as I know, so these would never work on a Classic CPC.

Also, the 16way MultiCart wouldn't fit in a standard cartridge case, so the new cartridge would need a new longer cartridge to house everything.

Bryce.

[mr_lou]

A mate of mine wants to buy a 3d printer. He says it costs about 1600 euro. And a kilogram of material costs about 35 euro.

How much does a plastic case weigh? Because printing a case for a CPC cartridge game would only cost 35/1000*weight_in_grams = price.

So let's pretend a case weighs 100 grams. That makes the price 3.5 euro. Make it 7 euro so that the guy who prints it for us makes a little money on it.

How much will the electronics part cost then?

I have noticed, that there are mixed opinions here about using a 3d printer. Someone wrote that printed cases breaks too easily, while others said they are strong'o'plenty. I guess there's only one way of finding out then: Try it. 

"Blueprints" of an existing cartridge can be made by a 3d scanner, or someone can build a model in a 3d program.

[TFM]

Well, he could just create some kind of cartridge, form a preexisting data file. Then you take that kind of cartridge and check its stability. So you will know if it could work.

[mr_lou]

Well, he could just create some kind of cartridge, form a preexisting data file. Then you take that kind of cartridge and check its stability. So you will know if it could work.

Exactly.

First he has to buy one though, and he hasn't made up his mind yet. 

[ralferoo]

Components wise, as I said you're looking at about £15, which might go down if a LOT of people are interested.

Actually, I was basing my estimate on a TSOP 29F040 (512MB flash), Atmega32u2+XTAL (USB and programming), Xilinx 7632 CPLD (ACID emulation and programming support).

The basic cost of the CPLD was about £4 IIRC. The flash chip is under £2 for the TSOP version, but for £3 you can have the larger through hole version of the chip which would enable people who already have a programmer to program the chip and you wouldn't need the Atmega chip. Personally, I don't think that's a great solution as the programming support only adds about £3 to the cost and you wouldn't need extra kit or to re-open the case to re-program it. The cost of the PCB varies depending on quantity made. In the tens, it'd be about £10 per board, in the hundreds or thousands maybe £3 down to £1 per board.

Regarding 3D printers, the cost of the plastic is an issue, but mostly it's just the time. I'd guess from seeing 3D printers doing their stuff that it'd be about 20-30 minutes per cartridge, so not really feasible for the numbers we're talking about. Also, 3d printed stuff tends to be obvious as if you use thicker a plastic to speed it up there's obvious ridging. It's all a trade off, but it's real benefit is one-offs IMHO. Also, from what I've seen people who own a 3D printer seem to just make things to show off that it can print rather than doing anything useful. :p

BTW, I'd say that €1600 is a VERY expensive 3D printer. I believe you used to be able to get all the parts for a reprap for about £500 if you were prepared to do some work yourself. Actually cost in plastic was about half that, the rest was how much you'd have to pay someone for the couple of hundred hours it'd tie up their machine to print all the parts for you.

[Trebmint]

Exactly.

First he has to buy one though, and he hasn't made up his mind yet. 

I think 3d printers are pretty strong now and detailed, but the time taken might be a consideration. Can't see producing more than 4 or 5 parts a day, and they need some manual input for each.