Is it possible to run games off an Action Replay cartridge? Perhaps Net Yaroze games with Caetla?

[retro_samurai]

Is it possible to somehow run games off an Action Replay cartridge?

On the Caetla's FAQ it says it can run Yaroze games, so I wonder if the game would be stored on the Action Replay cartridge itself.

It would be cool if that was possible, would make for an easy way to test if playstation consoles that don't have a working cd drive are functioning correctly, just plug the cartridge and start playing.

[nocash]

That kind of cartridges have around 256Kbytes FLASH memory, which contains the firmware (eg. caetla), there isn't any additional memory to store games on those cartridges.

Running games means uploading them via cable connection from PC to the connector on the PSX cartridge. There are different cartridges with different (but similar looking) DB25 connectors: Most have parallel "printer port" connectors, Datel has custom Comms-Link connectors, Psy-Q has SCSI connectors.

Uploading plain EXE files should work with all cartridge types. I think Yaroze and Caetla do additionally have some transfer protocol implemented for uploading additional data files (which can be loaded from within the EXE file).

[Forwas]

Hi. Interesting idea! It would be convenient to be able to run games directly from Action Replay, especially for testing PlayStation without a working CD drive. If the system allows you to download games, then perhaps there is a way to do it with other files. If such an option were implemented in consoles, it could seriously change the way you use old games!

[gwald]

Short answer is no because Net Yaroze requires a library that's 500kb in size.

[Administrator]

It is possible if you make your own cartridge and have all the available address and data lines connected to your ROM and you assemble your code to boot from the expansion port address space. Bank switching will be required if your ROM is very large though.

[gwald]

Is it possible to somehow run games off an Action Replay cartridge?

Looking at the question again, I would say yes possibly using: https://github.com/upx/upx

RS's Adventure game is 1.42MB made up of libps.exe, NY executable and assets.
Using upx with --best --force, it got it down to 402KB.

So if you don't use any assets, it's about 110KB, so yes it's possible to make a NY game boot from a cheat cartridge IF upx works as expected from the cartridge, which I haven't tried.

[MottZilla]

If you aren't trying to run existing games, you could make your own cartridge with a small boot ROM and a SD card interface to store your game + assets on the SD card. You would probably want to use the SPI method to access the card. But that would get around the problem of needing a very large ROM or bankswitching capabilities.

If you want to utilize the FAT file system that adds more complexity to it but it should be doable to make something like this. You could add other features to such a device too. The expansion area does have a pretty large area, maybe you could add some extra RAM.