PCJR Cartridge Items.

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jneuhaus
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Re: PCJR Cartridge Items.

Post by jneuhaus »

I would think you should be able to, but would have to design a new card to hold the newer chip as it's likely not the same form factor nor have the same pin locations. The only modern cartridge boards I am familiar with are from Raphnet and there are some on eBay as well.

The Raphnet one can even take a single chip 64k EEPROM, instead of requiring 2x 32k EEPROMs.
https://www.raphnet-tech.com/products/p ... /index.php

I don't see the eBay cartridges for sale anymore that I have a few of, but here is the seller in case they ever sell more again. These require the same 32k EEPROMs based on the original cartridge design.
https://www.ebay.com/str/jaelectronic

As far as if a modern EEPROM would work, I'm not sure what specs you would need to look at, but I would think that with as slow as the jr would access them, as long as you get the pins connected correctly it should work? But I'm sure someone with more hardware knowledge could chime in with more info.

Post if you find or create one! I'd be down to print and/or buy some :)
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chuckphd53
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Re: PCJR Cartridge Items.

Post by chuckphd53 »

Agree, no reason it should not work just fine.
Speed is usually the concern but with the chips today... not a problem.
keep an eye on the Voltage ratings of course, lots of chips today are 3v types.
Then only thing I might be concerned about is edge transistiin timing, Some of the older designs
Can get sticky on the clocking and such and with the new chips being so much faster, if the Jr design (which I dont think is the case)
might use the delayed rise time for proper triggering, it could get sketchy... but that is a long shot...

Give it a try, interesting experiment...
chuck
“I never commit to memory anything that can easily be looked up in a book.” (AE)
imperatorb
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Re: PCJR Cartridge Items.

Post by imperatorb »

The PCjr Technical Reference (2-107 thru 2-118 Program Cartridge and schematics B-20 thru B-22 Program Cartridge) documents the specifications for the cartridge. The original specifications for the ROM chips are found on 2-114. I've designed a few development-oriented cartridges from scratch, building a ROM-only cartridge is pretty straightforward.

Things to note:
0.) General/boilerplate warning for doing anything circuit related: if you're not familiar with how to read chip datasheets and schematics, and you mis-wire something, you can damage the machine. That is true of mucking with any electronic device, not specific to the PCjr.
1.) If you're designing your own PCBs pretty much any semi-modern EEPROM is likely to be fast enough. The Technical Reference lists 250ns response time and the electrical power and signals for the cartridge are 5V TTL, and the intended design expects <= 32K byte x 8 bit ROM modules.
2.) If you're trying to take existing OEM cartridges and swap out the ROMs, you either need to ensure you get EEPROMS with compatible pin-outs or build some kind of pin adapter
3.) Some of the cartridge software programs may expect to be loaded into a specific address range (using specific chip selects) so if you're attempting to write dumped copies to ROM chips and the cartridge maps them to other areas they may not work without patching (according to Hargle on the brutman forums [https://www.brutman.com/forums/viewtopi ... 8522#p8522] PitFall 2 for example is hardcoded to find its int9 implementation in the D800 range).
4.) Most of the cartridge dumps online are not raw binary images and are instead dumped as ".jrc" format with a header pre-pended (unfortunately, there are two incompatible .jrc formats with different sized headers floating around - one from the PCJRCART program [128 byte header] and one from JRIPCART program [512 byte header]). The header must be removed prior to writing the ROM to the EEPROM.
5.) You didn't ask, but the cartridge slots don't support write signaling to the cartridge slot. A few folks have developed various workarounds (Integrity Technology back in the period created a real time clock cartridge, Raphnet designed the modern SD-Cart JR, I designed a modern development RAM cartridge, etc.), but due to the way they work their write access methods require custom read-access sequences that don't work the way standard programs would expect.
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