Flash Cartridge

 

Jaguar Flash ROM CartPictured here is Jaguar Flash ROM cartridge. These were cartridges used by Atari to send out demonstration copies of games to magazine reviewers and used by developers to test their games and demonstrate their games at trade shows (i.e. CES, E3).

The cartridge contains 4 Megabytes of Flash ROM storage. It's designed to connect to a PC computer through it's parallel port. The user then downloads their game code, using a custom written Flash utility, and stores their game in the Flash memory. The cartridge is designed to be run on a development system or a production style Jaguar console.

I've spent a good portion of a week mapping out one of these cartridges to better understand it. Click on the picture to view/download a Adobe Acrobat file containing the schematic of the cartridge. Now if I can only get my hands on the GAL programming code for this cartridge...