Neo Geo CD embedding more ram into the neo cd

I have no idea what I am talking about here... and I am not that great of a tech guy.. but would it be IMPOSSIBLE to embed more ram into the Neo CD?

Would it be possible to embed like... 1 gig or at least the max amount to hold 1 entire game (the largest game)?

That way... the Neo CD could load the entire game to memory... and then play out of memory while playing the music from the cd?

I know some code would have to be written and put on the chips so that it would actually load the entire game.

But is this possile?  Or just wasted effort?

†B†V† :hat

I wish I knew. It would seem that in theory..at least..its possible. I'm in the same boat as you though..I'm not that techy myself.

I have no idea why no one has tried modifying a NGCD..I guess that theres just not much interest in it..and thats lame really.

Dr_Ackula said:

I wish I knew. It would seem that in theory..at least..its possible. I'm in the same boat as you though..I'm not that techy myself.

I have no idea why no one has tried modifying a NGCD..I guess that theres just not much interest in it..and thats lame really.

Click to expand...

I don't know... its that whole AES is 1337 argument.

I own all 3 systems (cd/mvs/aes) and the one that gets the most play is the CD.... at least for me.

†B†V† :hat

technikly all is possible (put more ram, change the CD by a 8X etc.)

the principal probleme is the bios of the Neo Geo CD ..., it s probable than this one don't know the modification

Sadly, this would be near impossible to do. I have never seen a NeoCD motherboard, but I'd bet there is no room for any expansion. So what you would have to do is find the RAM chips and get their part numbers. From there you look up the specs to find the pin outs, and use them to find other ram chips that have the same design with higher capacity. Once you have those, you would desolder the old ram from the motherboard, and put the new chips on there. Then you run into the problem kuk mentioned with the BIOS. The system was designed with a specific amount of ram in mind, so the BIOS will refuse to see anything more unless there the old one is patched or a new one is made. Even after all that, you still won't have any improvement to the games. Every game SNK released is just like the BIOS, in that they are made for a certain amount of RAM. They are all programmed to get their data from the original locations, so instead of loading more at once, they will just fill the same locations and when time for new data comes, load more from the cd drive.

Unless you did heavy editing to any existing CD games, the only thing more RAM could really help is MVS/AES to CD conversions. Considering the age of the system, even if you could find replacement ram, I'd doubt it would go high enough to convert the huge games like MS3 or KOF2k2.

Once all the cost and time is factored in, plus the chance of killing your NeoCD to get it to work. You are probably better off just getting an MVS and the games you want for it.

I know absolutely nothing about this tech porblems, but I noticed that when I put my NGCD games on my PC's 48x drive and use an emulator, the game load as fast as a 48x drive can allow, and load times are virtually gone... can this mean that a faster drive on a NGCD could improve load times?

Rainman said:

I know absolutely nothing about this tech porblems, but I noticed that when I put my NGCD games on my PC's 48x drive and use an emulator, the game load as fast as a 48x drive can allow, and load times are virtually gone... can this mean that a faster drive on a NGCD could improve load times?

Click to expand...

Yep. A faster CD Drive would help loading out alot. Even a drive as simple as 8x could fill all the NeoCD's memory in 7 or 8 seconds. Finding a replacement would be a big problem though, as SNK probably used a drive with a custom interface.

Actually a faster CD would cause problems. The hardware is probably limited to how fast it can move data over it's bus.

As far as memory goes, it would require a BIOS change, at the least. That's assuming the memory is actually visible (in some fashion) to the 68000. If not, the hardware would have to be modified.

And, then there's the problem of how each of block of memory is mapped. Each bank of memory would have to be stored sequencially in the available ram, so there's no way to increase the program bank without overwriting the next bank (for example).