http://www.retrode.org/2010/03/user-story-1-virtual-boy-adapter/

This story is kind of old, and not that detailed either…but I saw it while doing an unrelated Google search. In layman’s terms, or should I say lame man’s (that’s me)- what does this mean exactly? Is there any practical application for it? Thanks 🙂

There’s nothing too special going on with that Retrode mod. As stated in the article, the guy just connected the appropriate VB mask ROM signals to the Genesis cartridge. Most Genesis games are just a ROM chip on a circuit board, VB carts seem to be the same way. The only difficult part of that mod is actually hooking all those connections up.

The meaning behind this is a super easy way to dump VB cartridges… Not that you’d need to at this point, almost every game is dumped. There isn’t much else you can do with a cartridge dumper that you can’t do just by cruising your favorte ROM site. Personally, I like having cartridge dumpers for verifying repro carts to make sure the data is the same as the source file.

We got one of these together awhile ago. Just in-case something popped up. We used it to dump and re-check some of Ben’s demos (there were some dumps already avail. and we just checked the differences). I think Ben also made dumps of every game..just to have other sources. Pretty easy to use. If some thing does come up that needs to have the rom pulled..just let me know.

A lot more compact/easier to use/less complicated then making a dumper by hand.

If dragon hopper/zero racers ever shows up…we’re ready 🙂

-Eric

Ok cool, thanks for the quick tutorial :). I kind of figured that’s what they were talking about, but sometimes writers for tech things “project” a lot in their articles because they assume readers already know the basics. But, obviously I don’t!

I guess I was hoping this all meant I could play Bound High on my X’Eye :p

Ah, that’s where you were confused. That Retrode mod is solely for easy dumping. It has nothing to do with the Genesis, aside from using the cartridge to build an adapter out of. They probably could have used any other cartridge with some effort, but Genesis is the easiest because it’s so straight-forward.

The most interesting part of that article is how they say he started by using a PCMCIA adapter as the card slot. Could this mean that PCMCIA cards and VB Cartridges have similar connectors?

Not at all. PCMCIA is much more narrow.

Bummer. 🙁

Well, there’s always a hope of more prototypes out there 🙂

They’re out there somewhere..Here’s to hoping!