I just took an ampèremeter and measured the current that my Retrode draws from the USB port, with and without the 3.3V voltage converter, and also the additional current when cartridges are inserted and idle or busy. Turns out that typical current consumption will be between 20 and 50 mA. The extreme case is a [...]

Little file, big difference

While doing some minor tweaking on the firmware, I almost accidentally came up with a nice and straightforward way of turning the Retrode to some extent user-configurable. The root directory now contains a plain text file named snega2usb.cfg retrode.cfg, something like the following:

Over the last few days I implemented firmware support for SNES gamepads, with each gamepad appearing as its own USB keyboard for maximum compatibility. Thing is, though, that SNES gamepad connectors can nowadays hardly be obtained in larger quantities, so I have to leave this as a little soldering exercise for those who want to [...]

After quite some trouble trying to access the SRAM on the cartridge, I thought I would share the results here.

Unfortunately, I could not get the suggestions from DiskDude’s otherwise ultra-helpful SNES Kart document to work, so I had to do a bit of my own reverse engineering. The main issue is getting the SRAM chip’s [...]