I have made a completely homebrew connector strip that fits the VB and works with a pcb game fixed, with help from Kev Mellott, he found the inserts and kindly provided me with a connector I could take apart and measure.
Pics enclosed of the strip, fitted into a VB joined to a game.
The body is a 3D print with 60x inserts pressed in, it fits in a cart case and fits in the VB and I just slotted another game connector and pcb into it to check it would fire up and it did, all works. Couldn’t take a picture showing the game playing and the connector in place due to view angle thru the red lens, but it worked fine.
The problem is the metal inserts, these work out expensive for 60x per strip and means the strip I have made cost at least $20 for the parts alone. What is needed is to find a source for ‘off the shelf’ metal inserts that will accept a 0.4mm pin, be small enough to fit the connector pitch (2mm X 1.5mm) and have a solder tail end that can stick out the back of the connector, so need to be around 15mm total length. The type I have are round and I guess have been micro machined, could do with some sort of press formed type strip of inserts that only cost a few pennies each.
I have searched a lot, if anyone cares to take this up you may have more success, anything found please either pm me or post a site ref and pics here and I can check if I can make it fit a connector.
Here is Hedgetrimmers new connector on a cart. Electrically works perfectly. Mechanically my flash chip is too tall since the connector centers the PCB now. However, if I used my flash from HF32, then it would fit in a normal VB case. Very cool stuff.
The connector feels good and sturdy as well. You could make carts with these.
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Here’s a COTS connector solution that I just got. It may also work. Mechanically its fine. Electrically it needs biased to one side to make sure the contacts make full contact. Trying to find one with a tighter pin socket to eliminate the biasing. But I could make this work, if I had to.
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Here’s that COTS connector in a shell to help position it correctly. It’s working and I’m playing Bound High on one of my 16Mbit PCBs. Next steps are to try to see if I can get it to work with a regular VB case. Some bonding/gluing that needs to be figured out, as well as some revisions on the frame to add a back cover. I could build my own carts right now with this. I may want to spin the PCBs to use the memory that is in place on HF32 to give the case some more thickness over the chip. I’ll keep playing.
Latest iteration. Some tradeoffs, but the mini shroud works much better than I was expecting.
