Old Seag newbie how to interface???

[mikediv]

Hey guys awesome site, I hope you dont mind if I ask a question or two. I have a very old Sega console it works and a bunch of rom cartridges is there a way to interface this to my PC so I can program the 68000 and make my own roms? I have a few rom burners but no 68K asm I would just like to use the console like a hardware project interface some steppers ADC stuff so I guess I would need a good IDE some 68K asm and a way to interface the sega to a pc serial or usb and does anyone know what chips are on the game cartridegs are there any shcematics for this system kicking around? I see guys post they are programing them are they just making roms and pluging them in sorry about all the questions just wanted to get some use out of this and some fun any help would be appreciated thanks

[GiGaBiTe]

You would have to do a serious amount of work to have a live interface between a PC and the Genesis. The really old 1st generation Genesis consoles had EXT. ports on the back for the Meganet modem, which could be used to transfer data from the PC, albeit at 9600 baud.

There are no programs for doing this, so you would have to write your own to do the data transfers. In order to store the data, you would need some sort of RAM (64k in the genesis is nowhere near enough). You could probably devise a cartridge that had both a ROM for the file transfer program and RAM to store the programs and run them from. Though when you powered off the console, it would be lost so you may want to use EEPROMs instead.

As for what EEPROM to use, I'm pretty sure that most any 16-bit EEPROM will do, or 2 x 8 bit ones in interleave mode. You just have to wire the correct pins to the address and data pins on the cart. Devster had some schematics on how to make one on www.monkeeh.com